Philosophy is often characterized as the quest for truth, a noble striving. Truth itself is usually said to be located in the λόγος (logos), i.e. in statements, propositions that can be true or false. Plato's famous struggle against the Sophist in his eponymous dialogue strives to catch the slippery Sophist, who claims that it is impossible to make a false statement because that would amount to saying and asserting what is not, μὴ ὅν (mae on), non-being. The great predecessor, Parmenides, had been interpreted as prohibiting any attempt to say μὴ ὅν because it amounts to saying nothing. The Sophist, however, always said something, and accordingly this could not be contested because a false statement was impossible to make. His statements were all true.
The upshot of Plato's famous, intricate dialectic in his Sophist dialogue (254b-257a) among the five generic ideas (γένη) of movement (κίνησις, kinaesis), standstill (στάσις , stasis), same (αὐτό , auto), other (ἑτερον , heteron) and being (ὅν, on) is that non-being (μὴ ὅν) is indeed possible, because the idea (εἴδος, eidos) of other is able to mix with that of being. The negation of being through otherness does not result in total annihilation of being, but rather in a determinate negation. E.g. the negation of beauty (τὸ καλόν) is not nothing but the non-beautiful (μὴ καλόν, mae kalon), the ugly.
With respect to the logos (λόγος) as being (ὅν), it is shown through the dialectic that the logos can be either true (ἀληθής) or false (ψεῦδος), the latter through mixing with otherness. The Sophist is thus unmasked as a purveyor of falsehoods, and correspondingly, the Philosopher is shown to be the one who seeks the truth through true statements and enters the battle to refute false, sophistical ones.
Does that mean that the philosopher is like an investigative journalist who uncovers the true facts of the matter by exposing false statements? Not so fast. There is a difference between true, i.e. correct, facts as stated by a logos, and the truth of phenomena themselves, as we shall see.
The philosophical quest for truth would seem to have nothing to do with a struggle for power over others, for truth itself is supposed to be pure, standing above and untainted by the falsity that is employed to fool and mislead others. Philosophy would then be the endeavour calling upon us to humbly submit to the unvarnished truth as revealed by true statements. In particular, such true statements can be deduced syllogistically, i.e. by drawing conclusions from accepted premises via rules of inference. Logical argument then consists in presenting such a cogent derivation from accepted premises, that the opponent has to bow to the superiority of the incontestable argument. Hence there is an element of striving for power, after all, albeit a benign one, for the so-called good of the other, when all falsity is expunged from argument as far as possilble. Indeed, today's (analytic) philosophy is often represented as the contest among various positions to present the better, irrefutable argument.
A statement, however, always says something by interpreting what it is talking about as such-and-such. E.g. I hear a noise above my head and interpret it as a pigeon scratching around on the roof, an interpretation that may turn out to be either factually correct or false on closer inspection. I also implicitly interpret the pigeon, without further ado, as a living being, and in this interpretation there is further a implicit interpretation (or preconception) of what life itself is. The 'as' here is the hermeneutic or interpretive as, that is not merely factual, but concerns the preconceptions that inundate our understanding of the world and without which we would not be able to lead our daily lives.
What is the case, then, when I see swifts wheeling about overhead? I implicitly interpret them as a kind of bird flying in the sky, and flying itself is a kind of movement, so the generic idea of κίνησις (kinaesis) comes into play here. I easily recognize and understand the phenomenon of movement, albeit implicitly. My implicit interpretive understanding of what movement is has to be unfolded to become explicit. This interpretation is not singularly my own, but borrowed from the long tradition of interpretations of movement going back to the Greeks. The explicit interpretation of what seems to be self-evident has been the proper business of philosophy from the start.
Why the Greeks? Because it is the Greek philosophical interpretations of movement that tacitly have become globally hegemonic today by providing the foundations for all the modern Western sciences. The question, What is movement?, motivated Greek thinking from the very beginning. Early on, in Timaios, Plato counterposes the kind of movement called γένεσις (becoming) to ἀεί ὅν (eternity, standstill). Movement for the Greeks comprises especially all kinds of physical change, starting with becoming. The early philosophers were therefore also called 'physiologists' (φυσιολόγοι). Even time itself is conceived (hermeneutically) as either a measure of change or as the element in which all change takes place, whereas standstill, changelessness are identified with timelessness, as still is the case today. In this way, the phenomenon of time was interpreted as derivative of physical movement.
Although the Greeks are familiar with other kinds of change, such as a change of heart or soul, i.e. of the ψυχή, their thinking focuses on physical changes. Not only are the various kinds of physical movement (change of place, quantitative change, qualitative alteration, progeneration) investigated, but such movements are conceived as having a cause (αἴτιος). Scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) for the Greeks is always connected to aetiology. In this interest there resides already a will to power over (all kinds of physical) movement, and phenomena of movement are interpreted already under the impetus of this will to power. Efficient causality amounts to knowing 'if this, then that'. Such causal rules can be applied to control movement. If-then rules themselves rely upon a linear conception of time as a succession of instants that can be exactly measured by some sort of clock: If at one instant this happens, at the next, that will happen. This enables physical movements of all kinds to be predicted or, even better, manipulated and controlled.
The choice of kinds of physical movement as the focus of attention for Greek thinking on movement derives from its conceiving physical beings themselves to be composed of a 'look' or form (εἴδος) and matter (ὕλη). Matter, namely, can be manipulated. First of all, any know-how for making something, i.e. τέχνη ποιητική (technae poiaetikae), enables the possessor of the know-how, i.e. the maker, to causally control and master the movement of making toward its envisaged end goal, or (τέλος).
It was Aristotle who, in Book Theta of his Metaphysics, provided the first and only ontology of movement we have today, namely, the ontology of efficient-causal, productive movement that surreptitiously pervades all of modern science, even those sciences whose will to power over movement is directed also at non-physical kinds of movement, notably psychology, sociology and economics. Hence e.g. psychopharmacology aims to control psychic movement by means of material medications.
By trying to fit the ontology of efficient-causal movement to kinds of movement that are patently not physical, such as the phenomenon of rhetorical speaking, Greek thinking already did violence to the phenomenon by misinterpreting it (cf. Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric). Due to this infection by the unbridled will to power over all kinds of movement and change, modern science continues to do more violence to phenomena of movement by interpreting them as reducible to material causes. Hence, in particular and notably, there is a collapse of the mind into the brain in modern scientific thinking, a corollary of which is the denial of free will.
The interpretation of phenomena of movement through an ontology of efficient-causal movement is not false in the sense of being factually incorrect. On that level, given its presuppositions, everything is perfectly correct, and experiments can be carried out to verify the hypotheses postulated! The misinterpretation lies deeper, by forcing an ontological interpretation onto phenomena of movement that do not at all conform to the ontology of efficient-causal movement. The untruth of the interpretation cannot be detected by any empiricist scientific methodology, because the violence to the phenomena in question has already been perpetrated beforehand, a priori, in the very preconception. Hence, for example, data gathered from a large enough sample may reveal statistically significant correlations that point to underlying efficient-causal connections that remain ultimately merely hypothesized. A link between cause and effect is never physically detectable, but only hypothesized on the basis of experience with a postulated theoretical model. But no imaginable experiment can even prove that efficient-causal links pertain universally between occurrences.
The consideration of phenomena of movement and change different from the paradigmatic ones employed to consolidate today's scientific thinking can show that alternative ontologies of movement are necessary. The non-hermeneutic nature of today's hegemonic philosophy as taught in universities, however, prevents it from seeing the will to power nested within the noble quest for truth. This blindness is precisely the way the status quo can be upheld and scientific progress progress whilst simultaneously suppressing any alternative ontologies*.
* Cf. e.g. Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'.
Further reading: Plato Sophist.
Martin Heidegger Platon:Sophistes Gesamtausgabe Band 19 (GA19) Marburger Vorlesung Winter Semester 1924/25 ed. Ingeborg Schüßler, Klostermann, Frankfurt §§77-81.