The Parmenides and Plato's Late Philosophy (review)

Plato’s Parmenides presents a number of puzzles for the interpreter. Some of these are the result of the Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato’s late philosophy; due ultimately to Plotinus and still widely influential, it fails to give a satisfactory account of such elements of Plato’s metaphysics as the mathematicals, forms as “universals,” and an “acquaintance” explanation of our awareness of sensibles and forms. Turnbull strikes a decisive blow against the Neoplatonic interpretation of the Parmenides. More importantly, he makes considerable progress, where others have achieved only limited success, in placing the Parmenides into the wider context of Plato’s later thought.

The present work is primarily a translation of and commentary upon the Parmenides. The translation is not intended to be a literary work but rather as an aid to the reader of the commentary, and translation and commentary move forward together, section by section, as in Cornford’s edition. The translation is fairly literal, and some passages are omitted; in the notorious “exercise” of Part II the responses of Aristoteles are regularly elided wherever possible. In some places Turnbull has sacrificed English style in favor of interpretation-neutral renderings: “no many” for Zeno’s ou polla einai at 128b2, for example. While this can sometimes make the translation difficult to read in isolation, it is very useful for the knowledgeable but Greekless reader who can do without such interpretive intrusions as, for example, rendering to hen as “Unity” (Allen). The four final chapters serve to put the dialogue into its place in Plato’s later philosophy. An appendix discusses Cornford, Allen, Sayre, Miller, and Meinwald, as well as the standard lines of the Neoplatonic interpretation.

The strength of Turnbull’s interpretation is its attention to literary as well as philosophical detail. The significance of the dramatic coherence among many passages from dialogues generally thought to be late, particularly the Timaeus, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Philebus, has attracted the attention of other commentators, but it has not always been so convincingly connected to the related philosophical issues. With the Theaetetus and Sophist the Parmenides has been called “critical” in the sense that some commentators see in these dialogues a reassessment on Plato’s part of the ontology of forms as described in the Meno, Phaedo, and Republic. Turnbull, by contrast, puts the Parmenides squarely in line with the Republic and Plato’s middle period generally by connecting the dramatic setting of the two dialogues through the characters of Glaucon and Adeimantus; this, in turn, connects with the Timaeus, which is set on the day following the discussion of the Republic. Similar dramatic ties relate the Theaetetus to the Sophist, and the presence of the Eleatic stranger in the latter and mention of Parmenides in the former complete the artistic connections among these late dialogues and Plato’s middle period. The Philebus is connected with these dialogues because of its discussion of the four factors of the universe: Unlimited, Limit, the Mixture of Unlimited and Limit, and the Cause of the Mixture, factors that are also explored in Part II of the Parmenides.

The philosophical connections among the dialogues have their foundation in Plato’s attempt to give an account of the rational structure of the world system (the World Animal of the Timaeus) that underscores the importance of the ultimate sources of intelligibility in the kosmos. The Parmenides opens with a discussion of Zeno’s largely destructive arguments against plurality; Plato then employs Zeno’s own “method of suppositions” to present a constructive thesis to the effect that “from the fundamental forms, through the generation of the intelligible numbers, thence to their being mixed with the Unlimited (apeiron), there is and can be nothing that is that fails to be a source of intelligibility or the intelligible product of such sources” (187). The difficult deductions of the second half of the Parmenides thus exhibit two aspects: a negative, or Parmenidean, version, and a positive, or Platonic version. The Parmenidean...