Abstract

The article studies two texts closely linked to each other. In the first place, the final lines of Physics I 2, a text in which Aristotle offers a refutation against positions that propose to modify the language to adapt it to a monistic semantics that, from his point of view, involves a reduction of the senses of being analogous to that of the Eleatic thinkers that he has been criticizing. Second, the refutation that the Eleatic Stranger offers to the linguistic monists who “deny the possibility of saying one thing through another” in Plato’s Sophist 251a-254e. It is particularly interesting to illuminate the link between such passages in order to exhibit not only important points of contact in their respective positions regarding the relationship between being and language, but also some significant differences in terms of the doctrines each one of them point to, which denotes a rich and extensive discussion held at the time around the problem of unity and multiplicity in their relationship with language.