Abstract
Plato’s Parmenides is conventionally read as a two-part dialogue (part I and part II) with a brief transitional stage between its two main parts. This dialogue is based on a fictional story in which Zeno, Socrates, and Parmenides debate issues of philosophical significance at a small gathering in Athens. Part I begins in earnest with Socrates’s criticism of Zeno’s, and by extension, Parmenides’s, Eleatic doctrine. As a viable alternative to what he takes to be Zeno’s unsustainable view, Socrates outlines his own theory, which closely resembles the middle-period Platonic theory of Forms (TF). Subsequently, Parmenides levels a set of criticisms against Socrates’s TF. In the transitional stage, Parmenides recommends a complicated method, which he claims is necessary for the discovery of “truth.” In part II, he demonstrates this method by deducing consequences from eight (according to some, nine) main hypotheses and produces what we may call eight main arguments. Whether or not he succeeds in discovering the “truth” remains to be seen.
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Notes
For a summary of these controversies, see Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 630–45 (Cousin pagination). The controversy was revived during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
For a brief but wonderful study, see Raymond Klibansky, Plato’s Parmenides in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: A Chapter in the History of Platonic Studies (London: Warburg Institute, 1943).
For instance, Mitchell H. Miller opens his book on Parmenides with the following: “The Parmenides has surely proven itself the most enigmatic of Plato’s dialogues. In spite of a sustained and extensive history of discussion, there is no positive consensus about the basic issues central to its interpretation.” Mitchell H. Miller, Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3. Samuel C. Packless says Parmenides is “the most puzzling and notorious of Plato’s dialogues,” largely because its intended lesson is unclear. What “in Plato’s opinion,” asks Packless, “is the ultimate lesson of the dialogue?” Despite the concerted efforts of “generations of scholars, … there is still nothing approaching consensus on the answer to [this] most pressing question.” Samuel C. Packless, Plato’s Forms in Transition: A Reading of the Parmenides (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3.
For a lovely essay on satire in Plato’s works, see H. L. Tracy, “Plato as Satirist,” The Classical Journal 33, no. 3 (1937): 153–62.
The core theses I defend in this book have been proposed before. According to Proclus, some of his “contemporaries and predecessors” read Parmenides as an “argumentative (logikos),” or “polemic, … against Zeno.” Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides (630–32). Proclus, a Neoplatonist, treated this dialogue as an exercise in metaphysics with the aim of proving the transcendental, beyond-being nature of god, or the one. In 1578, Jean de Serres (Joannes Serranus) objected to the Neoplatonist interpretation of Parmenides. As Raymond Klibansky narrates, Serres argued that “the dialogue contains Plato’s discussion of Eleatic doctrines,” a discussion that satirically imitates “Parmenides’ deductive method” in order to criticize this method and the Eleatic doctrine. Klibansky, Plato’s Parmenides in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 47. This view proved too unacceptable for an intellectual world still inspired by theology, a world in which Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonist interpretation, which he proposed a century before Serres’s intervention, still dominated the attempts to give Christian theology a Platonic basis. At the beginning of the twentieth century, something like Serres’s interpretation resurfaced, most notably in the works of Alfred E. Taylor. For Taylor’s views, see Alfred E. Taylor, “Parmenides, Zeno, and Socrates,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 16 (1915–16): 234–89; Alfred E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (New York: Methuen, 1926)
and Alfred E. Taylor, The Parmenides of Plato (Oxford, Clarendon, 1934). However, Taylor’s works, besides making some contradictory and ambivalent claims, do not sufficiently defend these views. Today, Taylor’s interpretation is sardonically, and undeservedly, referred to as the “parody” or the “joke” interpretation of Parmenides.
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© 2015 Mehmet Tabak
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Tabak, M. (2015). Introduction. In: Plato’s Parmenides Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137505989_1
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