Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics logic of desire: Aquinas on emotion

7. Reconstructions: From Parmenides to Philebus

165 7 Reconstructions From Parmenides to Philebus Composed in the mid-360s, the Parmenides, Theaetetus, and Phaedrus form a revisionary triptych, the principal targets of which are the Phaedo and the Republic. The Parmenides affords an opportunity to start reshaping the Theory of Forms, adding precision and eliminating possible misinterpretations—chiefly about the scope of the intelligible world and the relationship of Forms to particulars. Plato progresses in the latter case while leaving the former still problematical , not least as to whether any distinction should be made between substance—forms, perhaps, as the Republic said, made by God, and forms of values. For its part, the Theaetetus expands the Republic’s epistemology, while in the Phaedrus we meet a different sort of reconstruction : in light of the Republic’s “tripartition” of the soul, Diotima ’s account of eros in the Symposium needs to be adjusted. For my dating of the triptych, a hint may be given in the Parmenides: in the second part of that dialogue Parmenides’ interlocutor is a young man, chosen as likely to give little trouble. His name is Aristotle, which might denote a late-fifth-century oligarch but also looks like a Platonic joke at the expense of a young and brilliant new recruit— perhaps already skeptical about Forms—who had joined the Academy in 367, and who apparently first attached the name “Third Man” to one of the more important arguments of the Parmenides itself. 166 From Parmenides to Philebus Like the Symposium, the Parmenides is largely in the form “He said that he said.”—Antiphon said that Pythodorus said . . . but the purpose of this elaborate device must now be different. Whereas in the Symposium Plato wants to situate the discussion of love in an apparent “Golden Age” of Athens, before the disastrous Sicilian expedition and the ruin of several of the participants, this elaborate device of indirect speech seems now intended to show that the meeting between Socrates and Parmenides (which the dialogue supposes to have taken place in about 450 B.C.) and the consequent dissection of the Theory of Forms does not take place in historical time. The Parmenides falls into two sections, with a linking passage between . In the first part Parmenides criticizes the Theory of Forms; in the second he gives an example of the kind of dialectical analysis “Socrates” will need if he is to justify his metaphysical claims. The linking passage explains that Parmenides accepts the broad outline of the theory, but insists that much more logical work is required if Socrates is to avoid misleading or imperfect representations of his proposals. That passage shows that those are in error who read the second part of the dialogue as a joke at the expense of logic choppers or as a mere example of logical skill, with no reference to the metaphysics of the Theory of Forms—as also are neo-Platonists who take it to be that exposition of the nature of the Good that Plato declined to present in the Republic. However, there is metaphysics in the second part of the Parmenides, and it is associated with advanced logical techniques to enable a more sophisticated presentation of Socrates’ theory, not least with regard to predication and to the self-predication of the Forms. The opening of the dialogue deliberately recalls the Republic, for the scene is set with Cephalus having just met Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. Cephalus wants to know the name of their half-brother Antiphon, a former friend of Pythodorus, himself a friend of Zeno of Elea, the pupil of Parmenides. Pythodorus had told Antiphon about a meeting of Socrates with Parmenides and Zeno; Socrates had wanted to hear Zeno reading from his own writ- 167 ings. Antiphon himself now relates the supposed meeting in which an absurdly young Socrates presents the Theory of Forms roughly as Plato had developed it in the Phaedo. As for himself, says Antiphon , he had long given up philosophy in favor of the management of horses (126c)—but it looks to be not entirely an accident that, before talking about the youthful Socrates, he dismisses a blacksmith with a commission to make him a bridle. In the discussion of the imitative arts in the last book of the Republic, bridles are one of the examples chosen by Plato to illustrate that it is only the user, not the maker or the painter of bridles, who...