Plato’s Parmenides

Introduction

Introduction Toute interprétation du dialogue qui laissera séparées les deux parties de l’oeuvre ne pourrait nous satisfaire. —wahl (1951), 8 PLATO VERSUS PARMENIDES Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret . Scholars of all periods have violently disagreed about its very aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic—and more often Neoplatonic —metaphysics1 to viewing it as a record of unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) “honest perplexities,”2 as protreptic “mental gymnastics,”3 as a collection of sophistic tricks,4 or even as an elaborate (though admittedly tedious) joke.5 Part I of the dialogue and especially the Third Man Argument have no doubt received more than their fair share of effort and ingenuity. During the last forty-odd years, the Third Man Argument has undergone detailed scrutiny by logicians, philosophers, classicists, and, in general, anyone who felt any connection with the subject, however distant. But while fine logical tools have been used to interpret the Theaetetus and the Sophist with important and interesting results, the Parmenides as a whole seems to have been, 1 1. For a summary of Neoplatonic interpretations, see Dodds (1928), Wundt (1935). The esotericist interpretation (e.g., Migliori [1990]), influenced by Krämer, can be seen as a variant of this trend. In the same vein, Séguy-Duclot (1998) interprets the dialogue as pointing beyond itself, to higher levels, up to a henological point of view above ontology. 2. Vlastos (1965b [1954]), 145. 3. Grote (1875), III, chap. 27; Peck (1953–54); cf. Kutschera (1995). See also Wilamowitz (1948), I 402; most recently Gill, “Introduction,” in Gill and Ryan (1996). Klibansky (1943: 28 n. 1) attributes such a view already to Alcinous (Albinus), possibly on the strength of chaps. 5 and 6 of his Didaskalikos. 4. E.g., Owen (1986 [1970]). 5. Cf., e.g., Taylor (1934), 29. until quite recently, rather neglected. Gilbert Ryle’s renewed suggestion that Parts I and II of the dialogue are only loosely connected (and were probably composed at different times) is perhaps not always explicitly accepted, but until recently it has with few exceptions been as a rule tacitly assumed, especially in the English-language literature, at least for practical purposes.6 In this dialogue, Plato directly engages Parmenides, the most serious challenge to his own philosophy.7 Plato’s interest in Parmenides is not new. From the beginning, his forms were meant to meet the requirements of Parmenidean being.8 Plato himself had reservations about Parmenides’ method and doctrine, mainly in connection with his own doctrine of participation.9 But never before had Plato confronted Parmenidean philosophy so directly and at such depth. From a Parmenidean point of view, there is no room for the most basic of Plato’s ontological concepts: the concept of mevqexiˇ, ‘participation ’.10 Unless a comprehensive alternative is offered to Parmenides’ logic and ontology, participation will remain unintelligible, and the Platonic philosophical program will be nothing short of incoherent. In the Parmenides, Plato reexamines his doctrine of forms and participation as developed in his central metaphysical dialogues, the Phaedo, the Symposium , and the Republic, and provides it with a rigorous logical foundation. Part I of the dialogue is an examination of the concept of mevqexiˇ from an Eleatic point of view. According to the Parmenidean view (or Plato’s version of it), being does not admit of distinctions. Even if there could be two ontological domains, or two types of entities, a relation straddling them both, like mevqexiˇ, would still be impossible. In Part II, Plato distinguishes between two modes of being, provides an extensive analysis of each, dissolves the apo2 introduction 6. See Apelt (1919); Wundt (1935); Ryle (1965), 145; cf. also Thesleff (1982). But the tide may be turning: see, e.g., Miller (1986); Meinwald (1991); Gill, “Introduction,” in Gill and Ryan (1996); Turnbull (1998). For summaries of previous interpretations, see Runciman (1965 [1959]), 167–76; Niewöhner (1971); Migliori (1990). 7. Calogero (1932) recognized the anti-Eleatic nature of the dialogue but read it as an ironical reductio ad absurdum of the “eleatismo megarico . . . di paternità zenoniana” in the manner of Gorgias’s Peri; tou¸ mh; o[ntoˇ. 8. Parmenides’ influence on Plato has been recognized since Antiquity: e.g., by Proclus in his commentary on the dialogue. See also Zeller (1876), 148 f. The question whether Parmenides held that to; ejovn is...