Abstract
It is somewhat of a surprise to discover eight arguments and an appendix in part II. Parmenides’s comments in the transitional stage do not clearly anticipate these arguments. The eight arguments are governed by eight hypotheses, or “suppositions” (henceforth, H1, H2, H3, etc.). If we ignore (for now) some of the anomalies and variations entailed in them, the first four arguments explore the consequences of the supposition, if the one is (positive supposition), and the last four consider the consequences of the supposition, if the one is not (negative supposition). Arguments 1 and 2 ask what the consequences are for the one itself, given the positive supposition. Arguments 3 and 4 consider the consequences of the positive supposition for the others. Arguments 5 and 6 consider the consequences that follow from the negative supposition for the one itself, and arguments 7 and 8 do the same for the others.
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Notes
John N. Findlay claims that the conclusions of all these arguments amount to the “whole truth,” which can only be expressed “in the complete round of our utterances.” John N. Findlay, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (New York: Routledge, 1974), 252–53. Findlay’s interpretation has a Hegelian ring to it. Georg W. F. Hegel says of Parmenides’s final, overall conclusion that “this result may seem strange” to those who are “far from accepting … quite abstract determinations,” which “show themselves dialectically and are really the identity with their ‘other;’ and this is the truth.” However, Hegel also says the dialectic in Parmenides is “not to be regarded as complete in every regard … The embracing of the opposites in one, and the expression of this unity, is chiefly lacking in the Parmenides, which has hence … only a negative result.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1894), 56–60. For an interesting critique of Hegel’s assumptions, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), Ch. 1.
Samuel Scolnicov argues that part I leads to aporia, and part II leads to euporia. Scolnicov insists that the conclusions of part II are hypothetical and thus depend on their suppositions. Furthermore, the eight arguments exercise two different modes of being, independent and dependent. The puzzle Plato wants to solve is the puzzle of participation—that is, how the independent Forms become many in and through participating in the other beings, which depend on Forms. Reversely, “the being of the many depends on the being of the one.” Somehow, Scolnicov assumes that part II shows the necessity of “an ontology of mutual participation of forms in each other and unidirectional participation of sensible things in Forms.” (Perhaps, given his main argument, Scolnicov means the participation of Forms in sensible things.) In a nutshell, Plato solves his own dilemma, raised in part I, by overcoming the Eleatic ontology. The first four arguments accomplish Plato’s mission, and the last four indicate the contrast between Plato’s new accomplishment and the historical Parmenides’s account. However, the Parmenidean one is still retained. Samuel Scolnicov, Plato’s Parmenides (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 166.
Samuel C. Packless thinks Plato is exclusively concerned with undoing his middle-period TF—especially with what he calls the radical purity (BP) of Forms (RP means that “no form can have contrary properties.”) Packless assumes, in a rather nonchalant manner, that “the one” of each hypothesis has the same meaning in all eight hypotheses, all of which he, one way or another, links to RP. He claims that part II is a general refutation of RP, which evolves into the replacement of RP with Forms that are “more prosaic, laid low, sharing features with the sensible world they were originally [in the middle-period dialogues] were meant to outshine.” Samuel C. Packless, Plato’s Forms in Transition: A Reading of the Parmenides (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 100, 240.
As Richard Robinson aptly argues, “it is surely inconceivable that Plato meant us to find a positive doctrine [in part II].” Richard Robinson, “Plato’s Parmenides I,” Classical Philology 37 (1942): 51–76, 51.
As Taylor points out, “the dialogue provides no solution of the problems it has raised.” Alfred E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (New York: Methuen, 1926), 360. Owen agrees, but for a different reason—namely, that the TF has been devastatingly undermined by Parmenides’s criticism in part I, and for this reason, there is no solution to be provided in part II or elsewhere.
Gwilym E. L. Owen, “The Place of the Timaeus in Plato’s Dialogues,” in Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. Reginald E. Allen, 313–38 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 320. Allen also says part II “dictates no solution.” However, he adds that Parmenides will address the dilemma of participation at the level of “utmost generality” and “will provide ample indication of where the source lies,” but he “will not teach the reader” how to fix it. Allen, Plato’s Parmenides, 205–6.
I disagree with all the following views: Gilbert Ryle says, “In the second part of the dialogue, Parmenides takes up [Socrates’] challenge” and shows how “Forms themselves underwent opposite predicates.” Gilbert Ryle, “Plato’s Parmenides” in Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. Reginald E. Allen, 97–147 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 100–101. Meinwald says, “Plato meant the second part of the dialogue to bear on the problems of the first.” Meinwald, Plato’s Parmenides, 4, 5–19. Sayre says part II modifies and refines the leading principles of the immature, earlier TF, which is defended by Socrates in part I. Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, 93ff. Turnbull says part II is both “a response to the problems raised in the first part of the dialogue” and “a significant departure in Plato’s mature thought.” This departure, he says, positively links Parmenides to “the other late dialogues.” Turnbull, The Parmenides and Plato’s Late Philosophy, 140–41. Scolnicov says, “The two parts of the dialogue form a coherent and integrated whole, in which Part II” provides “what Plato considers to be an adequate answer to the [objections] construed by Parmenides in Part I of the dialogue.” Scolnicov, Plato’s Parmenides, 3. Packless also thinks the criticisms given in part I are legitimate, and part II solves the problems highlighted in part I. Rickless, Plato’s Forms in Transition, 6.
Others disagree with this popular view but think the fallacies and contradictions are meant to instruct Plato’s students rather than satirize the method and the doctrines of his opponents. According Robinson, “every individual inference is made possible by an ambiguity”; many of the inferences are fallacious or absurd. It is highly likely that Plato recognized them to be so. Richard Robinson, “Plato’s Parmenides II,” Classical Philology 37, no. 2 (1942): 159–86, 159–62. Plato certainly did not mean for part II to be “a model of reasoning” for “us to copy.” However, Robinson says elsewhere that Plato meant for the dialogue to serve as “a manifesto” for his students to help them engage in “more dialectic and less enthusiasm.” Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, 265. This view is very ancient. As Proclus noted 15 centuries ago, “Some say that its [sole] purpose is logical exercise” or a training in dialectic. Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 634. Runciman argues that “the exhaustive application of this method” in part II “has been shown to lead as legitimately to one set of contradictory conclusions as to another.” He reasons that Plato’s purpose is to show how the method “does not solve the difficulties in which Socrates finds himself [in part I], but it shows how these difficulties can arise and hints that some other method is necessary. This [necessary] method is the method of diaeresis.” Runciman, “Plato’s Parmenides” 181.
Others disagree with this popular view but think the fallacies and contradictions are meant to instruct Plato’s students rather than satirize the method and the doctrines of his opponents. According Robinson, “every individual inference is made possible by an ambiguity”; many of the inferences are fallacious or absurd. It is highly likely that Plato recognized them to be so. Richard Robinson, “Plato’s Parmenides II,” Classical Philology 37, no. 2 (1942): 159–86, 159–62. Plato certainly did not mean for part II to be “a model of reasoning” for “us to copy.” However, Robinson says elsewhere that Plato meant for the dialogue to serve as “a manifesto” for his students to help them engage in “more dialectic and less enthusiasm.” Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, 265. This view is very ancient. As Proclus noted 15 centuries ago, “Some say that its [sole] purpose is logical exercise” or a training in dialectic. Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 634. Runciman argues that “the exhaustive application of this method” in part II “has been shown to lead as legitimately to one set of contradictory conclusions as to another.” He reasons that Plato’s purpose is to show how the method “does not solve the difficulties in which Socrates finds himself [in part I], but it shows how these difficulties can arise and hints that some other method is necessary. This [necessary] method is the method of diaeresis.” Runciman, “Plato’s Parmenides” 181.
There are also those (few in number) who think, as I do, that fallacies are rampant and parody both the doctrines and method of Plato’s opponents. As Taylor aptly points out, Plato’s “real purpose” in making Parmenides generate “perplexing ‘antinomies’ is to expose the contradictions in which we are entangled if we commit ourselves to the premises of certain other philosophers [not Socrates] who are the unnamed objects of Plato’s criticism, and we are also permitted to suspect that the methods of these philosophers as well as their premises are intended to be satirized; in fact, that the logic which leads to the ‘antinomies’ is the logic of the victims rather than of their critic [i.e., Plato].” Alfred E. Taylor, The Parmenides of Plato (Oxford, Clarendon, 1934), 8–9.
Paul Shorey says part II actually contains many fallacious deductions, and “the illustration of these fallacies is too symmetrical and exhaustive to be unconscious.” Paul Shorey, What Plato Said (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 242. Harold Cherniss maintains that “the second part of the dialogue is formally an elaborate parody of the logic-chopping of Zeno,” which is applied to the historical Par-menides’s “monistic Being” to produce paradoxes.
Harold F. Cherniss, “Parmenides and the Parmenides of Plato,” The American Journal of Philology 53, no. 2 (1932): 122–38, 122.
For a useful demonstration of a few of the fallacies, see Richard Patterson, “Forms, Fallacies, and the Functions of Plato’s ‘Parmenides,’” Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 32, no. 4 (1999): 89–106. 5. All direct quotations from Parmenides are from Plato, Parmenides, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. 2, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 86–140 (London: Macmillan, 1892). When necessary, I will supplement and modify Jowett’s translation by consulting other translations of Parmenides. These additional translations can be found in the following titles: Cornford, Plato and Parmenides; Allen, Plato’s Parmenides; Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson
Mary L. Gill and Paul Ryan, Plato: Parmenides (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996); Turnbull, The Parmenides and Plato’s Late Philosophy
Allan H. Coxon, The Philosophy of Forms: An Analytical and Historical Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum 1999)
Samuel Scolnicov, Plato’s Parmenides (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
and Arnold Hermann and Sylvana Chrysakopoulou, Plato’s Parmenides: Text, Translation and Lntroductory Essay (Las Vegas, NV: Parmenides, 2010).
According to Meinwald, Parmenides and Aristoteles only reject the fatal conclusion. Meinwald, Plato’s Parmenides, Ch. 4, also 180, n. 14. Also see Sandra L. Peterson, “Plato’s Parmenides: A Principle of Interpretation and Seven Arguments,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34, no. 2 (1996): 167–92.
Cornford adds two conclusions to his interpretation of argument 2, which I find unacceptable. First, “in the earliest stages [of argument 2] the objects of knowledge—Forms and numbers—had their place; and at the end we have the object of perception, the sensible body.” If so, argument 2 evolved from Forms to “the sensible body,” meaning that Parmenides did not always identify “the One and the Others … with Forms.” Cornford, Plato and Parmenides, 192–94. Rickless thinks argument 2 is solely concerned with a new and improved TF, which “luckily” does not rely on the radical purity (RP) theory of Forms. Rickless, Plato’s Forms in Transition, 183–87. As reported previously, others, such as Sayre and Turnbull, also find a renewed TF in argument 2. Also see G. E. M. Anscombe, “The New Theory of Forms,” The Monist 50, no. 3 (1966): 403–20.
Sayre also makes this point. However, he claims that Plato is here adopting Eudoxus’s theory of irrational numbers, which are “breaks along the continuum of rational numbers.” Sayre, Parmenides’ Lesson, 247–49. It seems that the instant theory actually has something to do with Zeno’s paradoxes. As Cornford rightly points out, the theory of time propounded here is incompatible with Plato’s views and may have something to do with the way Zeno’s opponents had conceived the latter’s theory of motion. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides, 201–2. However, according to Cherniss, Plato here might be parodying both Zeno and Antiphon, a follower of the Eleatics. Cherniss, “Parmenides and the ‘Parmenides’ of Plato,” 132, n. 35. For an informative discussion that also evaluates different interpretations of Zeno’s relevant paradoxes, see Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy, Volume 1: The Presocratics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 205–17.
Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1935), 115.
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© 2015 Mehmet Tabak
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Tabak, M. (2015). Parmenides, Part II. In: Plato’s Parmenides Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137505989_4
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