Plato's Late Ontology. A Riddle Resolved (review)

Book Reviews Kenneth M. Sayre. Plato's Late Ontology. A Riddle Resolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Pp. x + 328. $28.5o. Thanks to Kenneth Sayre's book, we no longer have to choose between the Ttibingen school (Gaiser and Kr/~mer) on the one hand and Harold Cherniss on the other. In order to make sense of Aristotle's seemingly strange report in Metaphysics A6.987b18ff of Plato's metaphysical views, the T~bingen school foisted upon Plato agrapha dogmata, doctrines not to be found in the extant dialogues. For his part, Cherniss did not attribute unwritten doctrines to Plato, and as a consequence he dismissed Aristotle's report of Plato's views as a misinterpretation of what is to be found in the dialogues. As Sayre points out, however, there is a middle ground between attributing to Plato unwritten doctrines and attributing to Aristotle a grotesque lack of understanding of what his teacher was about. We can deny the supposition shared by Cherniss and the Ttibingen school "that nothing corresponding to Aristotle's description of Plato's ontological principles in the first book of the Metaphysicscan be found in the written dialogues" (82). The denial of this common supposition allows us to try (once again) to make sense of Aristotle's report of Plato's metaphysics. This is what Sayre sets out to do. I think he succeeds. I think we can now accept Aristotle's report of Plato without recourse to unwritten doctrines. But, of course, we want to know: where in the dialogues do we find a discussion which provides the background for the report we find in Meta. 987b-988a? In this passage Aristotle describes Plato's (not the Platonists') ontological views in what might best be called "Pythagorean" terms. Reality has become mathematicized in a way which seems at first glance un-Platonic: the Forms are identified with numbers (987b21-22). Furthermore, in a manner unfamiliar to those for whom the Phaedo and the Republic provide Plato's most considered metaphysical views, the Forms are not the basic building blocks of reality; they are now constituted out of Unity and the Great and (the) Small. Again, it is in the face of such seemingly un-Platonic views as these that the Ttibingen school posited unwritten doctrines and Cherniss presented his case for Aristotle's misinterpretation of Plato. It is Sayre's view, however, "that the main tenets attributed to Plato in the first book of the Metaphysicsin fact are present in the Philebus" (x3). Sayre's book painstakingly and convincingly shows us that despite differences in terminology (e.g., the Great and [the] Small/the Unlimited), the account of Plato's metaphysics given by Aristotle in Meta. A6 and the Platonic views about the constitution and structure of reality to be found in the Philebus (at ~6-a 9 and 23-28 ) are one and the same. [579] 580 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~3:4 OCTOBER 1985 The Philebus, thus, is Plato's most mature work on metaphysical matters. Sayre is clearly not a unitarian in the Cherniss mold, and thus he does not deny that Plato changed his mind in later life on a number of key issues. As Sayre presents the case, the critique of (or the "... drawing attention to certain difficulties in .... " 25) the middle period (Phaedo, Republic) metaphysics which we find in the first part of the Parmenides led Plato to revise his notion that the Forms exist totally separate from the objects which participate in them. To be sure, thisclaim about what Plato was doing in the early part of the Parmenides and afterwards is not novel; but what I found particularly helpful was Sayre's careful elaboration of the progress of the non-separation assumption from its earliest stage in the Parmenides to its final form in the Philebua. Sayre takes us on an exciting journey from the (apparent) unknowability of separate Forms in the Parmenides to the non-separate reality of those objects in the Philebus. As Sayre presents the end of the story: "Since both Forms and sensible things come to be by the imposition of measure upon the same basic ontological principle [viz...