THE COPULA AND SEMANTIC CONTINUITY IN PLATO’S SOPHIST FIONA LEIGH   first made a radical claim about uses of the Greek verb ‘to be’ (einai) in Plato’s Sophist some twenty years ago (1986).1 The view has proved quite influential. It has attracted support from scholars such as Myles Burnyeat and Charles Kahn, who endorse it in works that treat of ancient texts besides the Sophist.2 Brown’s paper has been anthologizedin a well-received and popular collection of papers on Platonic metaphysics and epistemology.3 The proposal concerning einai was subsequently developed by her beyond the Sophist—and beyond Plato—in an essay on the verb that appeared in a collection of papers on language in ancient Greek thought.4 And in recent papers on the Sophist, Job van Eck and Blake Hestir have each assumed the validity of Brown’s reading without question.5 In brief, Brown’s innovation is as follows: The verb ‘to be’ in ã Fiona Leigh 2008 I am grateful to David Sedley, Lesley Brown, Dirk Baltzly, Allan Silverman, John Bigelow, and an audience at the University of Melbourne for insightful criticisms and suggestions on earlier drafts. 1 L. Brown, ‘Being in the Sophist: A Syntactical Enquiry’ [‘Being’], Oxford Stu- dies in Ancient Philosophy, 4 (1986), 49–70; repr. with revisions in G. Fine (ed.), Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology (Oxford, 1999), 455–78 (all references are to the later publication). 2 M. Burnyeat, ‘Apology 30 b 2–4: Socrates, Money, and the Grammar of γιγνσθαι’ [‘Socrates’], Journal of Hellenic Studies, 123 (2003), 1–25; C. Kahn, ‘A Return to the Theory of the Verb be and the Concept of Being’ [‘Return’], Ancient Philosophy, 24 (2004), 381–405; id., The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek (Indianapolis, 2003) (repr. of the first edition (Dordrecht, 1973), with a new introduction). 3 See n. 1 above. 4 L. Brown, ‘The Verb “to be” in Greek Philosophy: Some Remarks’ [‘Verb’], in S. Everson (ed.), Language (Companions to Ancient Thought, 3; Cambridge, 1994), 212–36. 5 J. van Eck, ‘Not-Being and Di·erence: On Plato’s Sophist 256 d 5–258 e 3’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 23 (2002), 63–84; B.Hestir, ‘A “Conception” of Truth in Plato’s Sophist’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41 (2003), 1–24. Created on 26 November 2007 at 16.41 hours page 105