| Summary: | The purpose of this thesis is to provide preliminaries for a better understanding of central parts of Plato's philosophy. Its method is a combination of traditional diachronic semantics and the study of the literary and social contexts of words which may be termed pragmatics. Its justification, it is hoped, is provided by an application of the results of those studies to a portion of Platonic text which is, in parts, reinterpreted in the light of some new findings. The point of departure of the investigation undertaken is a passage from one of the dialogues of Plato's middle period which is generally assumed to contain the essence of his thoughts on matters ontological at the time of composition: <I>Phaedo</I> 100d - 105e. From this text, a number of significant terms, most of them recurring in other dialogues of similar date, have been selected.
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