Europe and the stranger

With few exceptions, the prominent role of the Stranger in Plato’s late dialogue on the Sophist has drawn little attention in Plato scholarship. Yet, in this dialogue Plato charges the expatriated Stranger, who, furthermore, lacks a patronym and thus is not identifiable, remaining a stranger to the end, with the task not only of rejecting all philosophy hitherto as nothing more than a kind of storytelling about Being, but also of committing the parricide of Parmenides, the father of Greek philosophy itself. By refuting Parmenides’ thesis on Being, including the claim that Non-being is unthinkable and unsayable, the Stranger develops a philosophy that for the first time merits this title. The core of his doctrine of the “greatest kinds” consists in recasting Non-being in terms of otherness, thus unseating the priority of the principle of opposition that, until then, dominated philosophical thinking. This paper delves into what it means for Greek philosophy to invite a stranger to uproot its founding principles and replace them with a philosophy of alterity. I argue that, insofar as Europe, or the West, claims to have its origin in Greece, the Stranger’s philosophy of alterity is, perhaps, Europe’s most important but also least attended origin.