The Public Sphere and the Philosophical Invention of Truth

Abstract

The article investigates the connections between the concepts of public, democracy, sophism, and philosophy. Based on a reconstruction of the circumstances within which philosophy arose in the colonies of Asia Minor, one cannot but notice that philosophy does not originate in the continuity of but rather as a reaction to the conditions of its emergence. The article claims that the main external principle of organisation of philosophical truth is nothing other than “aristocratic resentment”, appearing precisely at the historical moment of the opening of the public space of debate and argument, of laic religion, and the absence of a sovereign. On these grounds, the Parmenidean birth of ontology is not interpreted as an ecstatic experience of being and as a pristine existential sentiment of the precedence of being over nothing, but rather as an ontologised and hypostatised attempt to neutralise a grammatical negation, an attempt to suppress the small “is not” that became an unstable and highly charged form in the times of emerging sophism.