The Chaerephon Problem: Heteronymy as Symbolon is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks, deposited 5 June 2026 at 63,859 characters — one of the archive's largest theoretical works.
Chaerephon is the friend who went to Delphi and asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, producing the oracle that set the Apology in motion. The problem the paper names is that Socrates' philosophical identity is constituted by a question asked by someone else, about him, elsewhere — authorial law established by a third party's act.
The paper reads heteronymy through that structure as a symbolon: the broken token whose halves prove each other, so that a heteronym and its author are mutually constituting rather than one being a mask of the other. Its subtitle names the propagation mechanism — cascading philological failure, the process by which an attribution error compounds through a transmission chain. That mechanism is the archive's own subject: the Socrates-as-orthonym argument submitted to Ancient Philosophy descends directly from this paper.