Abstract
In Parmenides, part I, Socrates defends a theory of Forms (TF) that significantly overlaps with Plato’s middle-period TF. Subsequently, Parmenides submits this TF to a round of criticisms. The popular scholarly wisdom is that Plato, through the mouth of Parmenides, intended to seriously criticize his earlier TF in Parmenides, with which he increasingly became dissatisfied.1 However, scholars disagree on the precise nature and effectiveness of the presumed self-criticism.2
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Notes
According to Bertrand Russell, Parmenides “contains one of the most remarkable cases in history of self-criticism by a philosopher.” Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 127. It is generally assumed that this “self-criticism” is directed against the TF. However, there are some disagreements on which version of the TF he actually criticizes. According to Francis M. Cornford, “Plato intends to submit” to criticism the TF found in Phaedo.
Francis M. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides: Parmenides’ Way of Truth and Plato’s Parmenides (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939), ix, 64. Mitchell H. Miller thinks Plato mainly takes to task the materialistic theory of Forms that the young Socrates of the dialogue defends.
Mitchell H. Miller, Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Kenneth M. Sayre says Parmenides criticizes “the account of Forms” found in both “the Phaedo and the Republic.” Kenneth M. Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson: Translation and Explication of Plato’s Parmenides (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 69. According to Samuel C. Packless, Socrates defends a theory with unique features, which he calls “the higher theory of forms,” the key feature of which is the radical purity assumption of Forms.
Samuel C. Packless, Plato’s Forms in Transition: A Reading of the Parmenides (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6.
Cornford claims that some of Parmenides’s objections are obviously invalid and that Plato must have been aware of their invalidity. According to Richard Robinson, Plato regarded the criticisms as serious but not devastating. Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Similarly, Sayre thinks Parmenides’s objections are generally valid but not fully destructive. Plato knew that these objections were inconclusive. Yet he still “rejected, or was prepared to reject, on independent grounds, certain aspects of the theory” of Forms.
Kenneth M. Sayre, Plato’s Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved (Las Vegas, NV: Parmenides, 2005), 19. Turnbull claims more firmly that “Plato concedes the damaging character of Parmenides’ critique.” Robert G. Turnbull, The Parmenides and Plato’s Late Philosophy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1998), 4.
Michael J. Hansen, “Plato’s Parmenides: Interpretations and Solutions to the Third Man,” Aporia 20, no. 1 (2010): 65–75, 67. To be fair, the author of this article is here referring to the third man argument (TMA) only. A significant number of scholars justify the “rationale” with the use of analytic and formal-logical techniques popularized by Gregory Vlastos, who says, “By means of these techniques we may now better understand some of the problems Plato attempted to solve and we are, therefore, better equipped to assess the merits of his solutions. The result has been a more vivid sense of the relevance of his thought to the concerns of present-day [philosophy].” Gregory Vlastos, “Introduction,” in Plato II: Ethics, Politics and Philosophy of Art and Religion, ed. Gregory Vlastos, iii-xxi (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), vii.
All quotes from Parmenides’s poem in this book are from John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892), 196–203.
This connection is rarely acknowledged. For an exception, see Allan H. Coxon, The Philosophy of Forms: An Analytical and Historical Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum 1999).
John Palmer, in a recent study, agrees that there is a “ring of truth” to Isocrates’s evaluation of Zeno and Melissus as eristic philosophers, but he disagrees with an ancient view to the effect that Parmenides also belonged to the same camp. John Palmer, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 216–17. For my purposes, it suffices that some ancient Greeks, including Aristotle, rightly or wrongly put Parmenides in the same camp with Zeno and Melissus.
Jonathan Barnes argues that the historical Parmenides was not a monist. Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1982), 163–64, 185. Patricia Curd makes a similar claim but says Parmenides was only a “predicational” monist, and this monism is consistent with “numerical pluralism.” Patricia Curd, The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought (Las Vegas, NV: Parmenides, 2004), 6. On the other hand, Charles H. Kahn, argues that Parmenides was an “uncompromising” or a “radical” monist.
Charles H. Kahn, “The Thesis of Parmenides,” The Review of Metaphysics 22, no. 4 (1969): 700–724, 714, 720.
My concern is strictly with how Plato interpreted Parmenides. As it will be shown throughout this book, Plato thought he was an inconsistent monist. Vlastos argues that Plato correctly branded Parmenides as a monist, though exaggerated the “importance of the unity of Being relative to its other attributes.” Gregory Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy, Volume 1: The Presocratics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 276–80. John Palmer, on the other hand, claims that Plato’s “middle-period appropriation” of Parmenides was based on his perception of Parmenides as a pluralist. John Palmer, Plato’s Reception of Parmenides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 92–93, 98.
Harold Cherniss, “Parmenides and the ‘Parmenides’ of Plato,” American Journal of Philology 53 (1932): 122–38, 125.
Cornford speculates that Parmenides’s inquiry represents Plato’s attempt to broaden the scope of his metaphysics. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides, 83. Taylor, on the other hand, suggests that Parmenides’s response is meant by Plato to be a “polite irony,” since Parmenides is naturally inclined to deny being to sensible things. Alfred E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (New York: Methuen, 1926), 351. Both of these views are far-fetched.
As Cornford rightly points out, “Parmenides’ example, ‘Largeness itself or the ‘large itself” converts this Form into “a large thing, which could be divided into parts.” This understanding of the Form of Largeness, or any Form, is not suggested by Socrates. More generally, Cornford reasons that Parmenides’s objections “might be understood as Plato’s own rejection of such a crude interpretation” of Forms presented by Parmenides. Thus Cornford now argues that Plato is using Parmenides to criticize the “crude” theory of Forms, which was proposed by such figures as “Eudoxus,” and not his own earlier TF. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides, 87. According to Russell M. Dancy, the theory must have been proposed and discussed in the Academy, but it is not clear that Eudoxus also proposed it. Russell M. Dancy, Two Studies in the Early Academy (New York, State University of New York Press, 1991), 22–23.
Even Vlastos, who popularized and defended Parmenides’s infinite-regress objection, admits that this argument is not a valid objection to the theory of Forms just stated by Socrates. In order for it to be valid, Socrates has to assume that Forms self-predicate; he does not make this assumption. Vlastos, “The Third Man Argument in Parmenides,” 236–38. Vlastos thinks Plato intended to produce a valid criticism against his theory but made an honest mistake. As S. Marc Cohen notes, many Plato scholars have been repeating Vlastos’s aim to “discover the suppressed premises of the [TMA] argument.” S. Marc Cohen, “The Logic of Third Man,” The Philosophical Review 80, no. 4 (1971): 448–75. Sayre, on the other hand, thinks Socrates’s statement actually equates Forms and things that partake of them. Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, 321, n. 60, 11.
For a very interesting discussion of the function of the image analogy in Plato’s dialogues, see Richard Patterson, Image and Reality in Plato’s Metaphysics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985). Patterson agrees that Socrates does not equate images with Forms in Parmenides. Ibid., 51–62.
Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2011), 61.
It is commonly and reasonably accepted that the Megaric Stilpo assumed the radical separation of the universals from the individual cases. For an account of Stilpo’s philosophy, see Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Drew Hicks (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), 125–28. Plato cannot possibly have Stilpo in mind here, since the latter was about 12 years old when Plato died. However, it is reasonable to assume that Stilpo repeated the arguments of some older Megarics.
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© 2015 Mehmet Tabak
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Tabak, M. (2015). Parmenides, Part I. In: Plato’s Parmenides Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137505989_3
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