 For Rosenstock-Huessy, the problem with the kind of case Plato makes in favor of essences and against names in the Cratylus (where he provides a satire on the sophists’ use of etymology) is that the essence is purchased at the expense of the many processes which names rightly recognize as many. Of course Plato insists that the one and the many must be brought into the union of knowledge’s correct definition. But Rosenstock-Huessy argues that names are primarily an historical founding, and hence not a logical matter. Rosenstock-Huessy emphasized this point in his Lectures on Greek Philosophy when he contrasted Book 2 of the Iliad, where Homer recalls the ships and the names of the places and commanders of the different armies of the Greeks, with Plato. ‘Homer’s heart,’ he says, ‘is in following the first impressions also in the physical, in the real life…He’s not systematic. He’s anti-philosophical…Because a philosopher must have all his material gathered before he can subdivide it…Therefore it’s always a second impression, it’s an afterthought.’ Whereas the philosopher is suspicious of the same name that may be concealing different essences, Homer is not interested if two people have the same name in trying to establish a common essence, but in this naming of the ships ‘poetry has to keep the individual names of every one city here’ (1956b, Oct 18).