Troubling Play: Meaning and Entity in Plato's Parmenides

Troubling Play is a new and illuminating interpretation of Plato’s Parmenides—notoriously the most difficult of the dialogues. Showing that the Parmenides is an inquiry into time and the forms of language, author Kelsey Wood notes that the dialogue’s suggestion of sophistry is intended to provoke the silently observant Socrates. The young Socrates believes that knowing is prior to existence, but Parmenides ultimately shows him that the meaning of intelligible discourse is derived from existence in time. Although we cannot think apart from intelligible forms, nevertheless, any number of modes of intelligibility are possible. This relation of ideals of intelligibility—the forms of logos—to temporal being is a crucial topic of special relevance to philosophers today. Wood’s detailed methodological analysis ties the Parmenides to other later dialogues such as the Sophist, Theatetus, and Philebus, and also to earlier works such as the Republic and the poem of Parmenides.