Being worthy of one's name. Platonic tensions between language and reality

This essay aims to show to what extent names play a crucial role in Plato’s philosophy. Important in terms of their capacity to identify and evoke, the names that play a role in Homeric epic are proper names. In the Platonic dialogues, this role would appear to have been ‘inherited’ by common nouns, which are assigned an original function within a new cultural context. Within the framework of the paideutic debates that Socrates engages in with his interlocutors, names represent something akin to models to be imitated or goals to be attained. Indeed, paideia boils down to the formula that invites human beings to become worthy of their names.