In Plato’s Euthydemus, a young man named Ctesippus is trapped by a sophist (paraphrased from Plat. Euthyd. 298e):
You have a dog? — Yes, a mischievous one.
And the dog is a father? — Of puppies, yes.
So the dog is a father. And you have a father? — Yes.
So you have a father, and the dog is a father. Therefore, the dog is your father.
Plato’s Euthydemus is, on the surface, a comedy. It is full of logical fallacies, verbal gymnastics, and the kind of wild, circular reasoning that seems designed less to enlighten than to bewilder. Readers often come to it as one of the “lighter” dialogues, a playful satire of sophists and their absurd arguments. One of those arguments, perhaps the most absurd of all, is the one you have just read.
But Plato is not likely to be joking. He himself took these arguments seriously in future dialogues, such as the Sophist, the Parmenides, and the Theaetetus, where he confronted the deep ambiguities of identity, falsehood, and non-being. What begins in Euthydemus as an attempt to ridicule his opponents, the sophists, becomes the foundation of a philosophical crisis in Plato’s later work.
So in this tentative blog series, I begin by taking the statement seriously: what if the dog really is your father? Or is the father your dog? Euthydemus may be a comedy, but comedy is not necessarily the opposite of seriousness. It is, often, another path to what we cannot say directly, especially when it involves our parents and kin.
The structure of Euthydemus reinforces this reading. Socrates recounts the dialogue to Crito, who tells Socrates that he is worried about his own son being educated by sophists. Meanwhile, Cleinias, the beautiful boy at the center of the discussion, is positioned between the sophists and Socrates like a child caught between competing fathers. This layering is significant: Socrates is not merely defending philosophy from sophistry; he is also, in a deeper sense, trying to justify fatherhood itself. Socrates defends the unity of being, wisdom, and kinship against a rhetorical hydra that spawns a bewildering multiplicity of “father-heads.” (Plat. Euthyd. 297c) Who is a father—or perhaps, who is Father?
Indeed, in Ancient Greek, as in many languages, terms like “father” are used both to denote a specific individual and to name a general role. Children (big and small) don’t usually say, “my father is in the kitchen,” let alone “a father is in the kitchen.” They say, “Father/Dad is in the kitchen,” and we, as their interlocutors, are happy to respond, “Tell Dad I said hello.” But this means that Dad could be anyone’s father, including ours! Could Plato’s philosophy — and by extension, all of philosophy — be an attempt to come to terms with human kinship? In the Euthydemus, the sophists effectively tell us that we are fatherless, because if the child’s father is Father, then ours cannot be Father too.
So who is our father, then? The dog, perhaps. And maybe now we can understand why Socrates always swore “by the Dog!”