On Non-Existence

E359021

ancient Greek work lost philosophical treatise sophistic treatise

On Non-Existence is a lost sophistic treatise, attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Gorgias, that famously argues in paradoxical fashion that nothing exists, that if anything did exist it would be unknowable, and that if it were knowable it could not be communicated.

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All labels observed (2)

Label	Occurrences
On Non-Being	1
On Non-Existence canonical	1

Statements (44)

Predicate	Object
instanceOf	ancient Greek work ⓘ lost philosophical treatise ⓘ sophistic treatise ⓘ
aimsAt	demonstrating the power of rhetoric ⓘ undermining common assumptions about being ⓘ
argumentStyle	eristic ⓘ paradoxical ⓘ rhetorical ⓘ
associatedWithCity	Leontini ⓘ
attributedDate	classical period of ancient Greece ⓘ
authorAttributedTo	Gorgias ⓘ Gorgias ⓘ surface form: Gorgias of Leontini
circulation	ancient Greek intellectual circles ⓘ
contrastsWith	Parmenidean ontology ⓘ
culturalContext	classical Greek sophistic movement ⓘ
genre	philosophical prose ⓘ
historicalPeriod	5th century BCE ⓘ
influenceOn	ancient skepticism ⓘ later discussions of nihilism ⓘ
knownThrough	later doxographical accounts ⓘ secondary reports ⓘ testimonia in ancient authors ⓘ
logicalForm	trilemma about being, knowing, and saying ⓘ
mainClaim	if anything did exist it would be unknowable ⓘ if anything were knowable it could not be communicated ⓘ nothing exists ⓘ
originalLanguage	Ancient Greek ⓘ
philosophicalIssue	communication ⓘ existence ⓘ knowledge ⓘ
philosophicalPositionType	radical skepticism about existence ⓘ skepticism about communication ⓘ skepticism about knowledge ⓘ
philosophicalTradition	Sophism ⓘ ancient Greek philosophy ⓘ
relatedTo	Gorgias ⓘ Parmenides ⓘ Sophists ⓘ
subjectMatter	epistemology ⓘ metaphysics ⓘ philosophy of language ⓘ skepticism ⓘ
textualState	survives only in fragments and reports ⓘ
workStatus	lost ⓘ

How these facts were elicited

The pipeline generated the facts above by prompting gpt-5.1 with this entity's name + description and the instruction below.

Instruction

You are a knowledge base construction expert. Given a subject entity and a description of it, return factual statements that you know for the subject as a JSON list of dictionaries(triples), where keys must be "subject", "predicate" and "object". The number of facts may be very high, between 25 to 50 or more, for very popular subjects. For less popular subjects, the number of facts can be very low, like 5 or 10.

# Requirements
- If you don't know the subject at all, return an empty list.
- If the subject is not a named entity, return an empty list.
- Include at least one triple where predicate is "instanceOf".
- Do not get too wordy.
- Separate several objects into multiple triples with one object.

Input

Subject: On Non-Existence
Description of subject: On Non-Existence is a lost sophistic treatise, attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Gorgias, that famously argues in paradoxical fashion that nothing exists, that if anything did exist it would be unknowable, and that if it were knowable it could not be communicated.

Referenced by (2)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

Gorgias → notableWork → On Non-Existence ⓘ

On Nature → hasTitleVariant → On Non-Existence ⓘ

this entity surface form: On Non-Being