Zeno’s Stricture and Predication in Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus

Abstract

Much philosophical insight (to say nothing of scientific insight) has been the result of taking very literally and even simple-mindedly the things which we say and think. Having so taken them, one may, with minimum risk of verbal bewitchment, hold them up to critical scrutiny. What seemed obvious in its standard rhetorical garb may then suddenly appear trivial, highly questionable, or even impossible. Socrates’ practice in the early and middle Platonic dialogues is, of course, a standard example of this common philosophical procedure. Sometimes the insight garnered from this procedure comes only after it has been used aporetically or even to promote apparent absurdity. I think, for example, that a number of arguments for philosophical scepticism are of this latter sort. Though an argument designed to enforce or clarify a distinction between knowledge and opinion does not as such promote absurdity, surely one designed to show that knowledge as such is impossible does. I readily acknowledge, however, that the promotion of apparent absurdity has actually led to insight, as the responses of, for example, Augustine, Descartes, or Berkeley to apparently absurd scepticism show. But my concern in his paper is not with scepticism or any responses to it. It is rather with an argument which Plato attributes to Zeno and which promotes quite a different absurdity. What I wish to do is, first, to state the argument and, second, to look rather carefully at what I take to the responses of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus to it.