Forms in the Philebus

Notes and Discussions FORMS IN THE PHILEBUS In a recently published monograph, 1Roger Shiner argues that there is no textual evidence in the Philebus incompatible with the thesis of revisionism, i.e., the view that Plato in his later dialogues abandoned the "choristic" ontology of the middle dialogues, which held that Forms exist in an intelligible world of their own apart from the world of sensible particulars. Shiner concedes that little or no positive evidence in favor of revisionism can be found in the Philebus-- for this evidence, he thinks, we must look to the other late dialogues--but his weaker claim is nevertheless vital to the revisionist thesis, since the Philebus contains passages which seem prima facie to endorse the theory of Transcendent Forms. I shall argue that Shiner does not succeed in neutralizing this prima facie appearance of endorsement, and therefore that his defense of revisionism fails. The crucial portion of the text is Philebus 55-62, in which Plato rates different kinds of knowledge according to their purity. He concludes that the purest kind is the art of dialectic, which is pre-eminent in virtue of its object. That is, by dialectic we have "the cognition of that which is, that which exists in reality, ever unchanged ..." (58a, Hackforth translation). Such knowledge is contrasted with the study of "the universe around us, how it came to be, how it does things and how things happen to it..." (59a). This latter study is inferior because it "has nothing to do with that which always is, but only with what is coming into being, or will come, or has come" (59a). No precise or exact truth can be attached to things "none of which are at this present, or ever were, or ever will be free from change" (59b), and we cannot "get a permanent grasp on anything that is entirely devoid of permanence" (59b). Thus, we find fixity, purity, truth and what we have called perfect clarity, either in those things that are always unchanged, unaltered and free of all admixture, or in what is most akin to them; everything else must becalled inferior and of secondary importance. (59c) Surely, we want to say, Plato is here reiterating the theme of the middle dialogues: the Forms, as unchangeable objects of the knowledge obtained by dialectic, are contrasted with the transitory-- and therefore inferior-- objects of sense. Admittedly the Forms receive no explicit mention in these passages, but the text could only with difficulty be read as referring to anything else. It is to provide just such an alternative reading that Shiner sets as his main task. He concedes that these passages indeed espouse a sort of ontological dualism, but he argues that nothing in the Philebus implies that this is a dualism between sensible particulars and Transcendent Forms. Rather, the only sort of ontological dualism to which the text commits Plato is that of concepts and their instantiations in sensible particulars. Concepts, on this interpretation , are real, objective entities, in no way mind-dependent, which yet have no Knowledgeand Reality in Plato'sPhilebus(Assen,The Netherlands:Van Gorcum, 1974). [2021 NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 203 separate existence as "paradigms existing in a transcendent world of their own, unseen by mortal eye. ''2 This ontological distinction between concepts and instances is sufficient, Shiner supposes, to account for the parallel epistemological distinction between knowledge of sensible things and knowledge of the unchangeable. This latter sort of knowledge is simply knowledge of the definitions of a priori concepts and as such is timeless and eternal, being a matter of logical or conceptual--as opposed to empirical--inquiry. Shiner thus allows that the Philebus shows Plato to believe that there are timeless conceptual truths which constitute the highest, most perfect kind of knowledge, but he maintains that this no more commits Plato to a belief in transcendent entities than it does Aristotle, who also upholds the primacy of conceptual knowledge. This invocation of Aristotle is significant, since, although Shiner does not specifically discuss the sort of ontological status concepts are supposed to have in the Philebus, the only possibility, so far as I can see, is to make Plato an immanent realist along...