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The Parmenides purports to be an account of a meeting between the two great philosophers of the Eleatic school, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, and a very young Socrates. The occasion of the meeting was the reading by Zeno of his treatise defending Parmenidean monism against those partisans of plurality who asserted that Parmenides' supposition that there is a one gives rise to intolerable absurdities and contradictions.

Employing his customary method of attack, the reductio ad absurdum, Zeno has argued that if as the pluralists say things are many, then they will be both like and unlike; but this is an impossible situation, for unlike things cannot be like, nor like things unlike. But this difficulty vanishes, says Socrates, if we are prepared to make the distinction between sensibles on the one hand and Forms, in which sensibles participate, on the other. Thus one and the same thing can be both like and unlike, or one and many, by participating in the Forms of Likeness and Unlikeness, of Unity and Plurality; I am one man, and as such partake of the Form of Unity, but I also have many parts and in this respect I partake of the Form of Plurality. There is no problem in demonstrating that sensible things may have opposite attributes; what would cause consternation, and earn the admiration of Socrates, would be if someone were to show that the Forms themselves were capable of admitting contrary predicates.

At this point, Parmenides takes over as Socrates' interlocutor and dominates the remainder of the dialogue. After establishing that Socrates himself has made the distinction between Forms and sensibles, Parmenides asks him what sorts of Form he is prepared to recognize. Socrates replies that he has no doubt about the existence of mathematical, ethical and aesthetic Forms (e.g., Unity, Plurality, Goodness, Beauty), but is unsure of Forms of Man, Fire and Water; he is almost certain, though admits to some reservations, that undignified objects like hair, mud and dirt do not have Forms. Parmenides suggests that when he is older and more committed to philosophy, he will consider all the consequences of his theory, even regarding seemingly insignificant objects like hair and mud.

For the remainder of the first part of the dialogue, Parmenides draws Socrates out on certain aspects of the Theory of Forms and in the process brings to bear four arguments against the theory.

Argument 1. If particular things come to partake of the Form of Beauty or Likeness or Largeness they thereby become beautiful or like or large. Now each particular thing must receive either the whole of the Form of which it partakes, or a part of that Form. Either way, however, the Form becomes many - in the first case by multiplication, in the second by division - and thus will not still be one.

Argument 2. Socrates' reason for believing in the existence of a single Form in each case is that when he views a number of large (for example) things, there appears to be a single character which they all share, viz. the character of Largeness. But consider the series of large things: x,y,z, Largeness Itself. If all members of this series partake of a single Form, it must be the Form Largeness Two. Similarly, x,y,z, Largeness and Largeness Two must all partake of a further Form, Largeness Three, and so on ad infinitum. Hence, instead of there being one Form in every case, we are confronted with an indefinite number. This is the famous Third Man Argument (TMA), which Aristotle was to take up again in his criticism of Plato.

Argument 3. To the suggestion that each Form is a thought existing in a soul, thus maintaining the unity of the Form, Parmenides replies that a thought must be a thought of something that is a Form. Thus we still have to explain the participation relation. Further, if things share in Forms which are no more than thoughts, then either things consist of thoughts and think, or else they are thoughts, yet do not think.

Argument 4. The gravest difficulty with the theory of Forms arises as a consequence of the assertion of the separate existence of the Forms. Forms do not exist in our world but have their being with reference to one another in their own world. Similarly, things of our world are related among themselves, but not to Forms. Just as Mastership has its being relative to Slavery, so mastership in our world has its being relative to slavery in our world. No terrestrial master is master of Slave itself, and no terrestrial master-slave relation has any relationship to the ideal Master-Slave relation. And so it is with knowledge. All our knowledge is such with respect to our world, not to the world of the Forms, while ideal Knowledge is knowledge of the things not of our world but of the world of the Forms. Hence, we cannot know the Forms. What is more, the gods who dwell in the divine world, can have no knowledge of us, and nor can their ideal mastership rule us.

In spite of Socrates' inability to defend the theory against Parmenides' arguments, in the following transitional section of the dialogue Parmenides himself appears to advocate the theory. He insists that without Forms there can be no possibility of dialectic, and that Socrates was unable to uphold the theory because he has been insufficiently exercised. There follows a description of the kind of exercise, or training, that Parmenides recommends. The remainder of the dialogue is taken up with an actual performance of such an exercise, where a young Aristoteles (later a member of the Thirty Tyrants) takes the place of Socrates as Parmenides' interlocutor.

This difficult second part of the dialogue is generally agreed to be one of the most challenging, and sometimes bizarre, pieces in the whole of the Platonic corpus. It consists of an unrelenting series of difficult and subtle arguments, where the exchange is stripped of all the but the bare essentials of the arguments involved. Gone are the drama and colour we are accustomed to from earlier dialogues.

A satisfactory characterisation of this part of the dialogue has eluded scholars since antiquity. Some of the best minds have tried, among them Cornford, Russell, Ryle, and Owen; but few would accept without hesitation any of their characterisations as having got to the heart of the matter. Lately, Meinwald (1991) has offered an ingenious solution but scholars have been equally slow to take her particular reading on board. It is difficult to offer even a preliminary characterisation, since commentators disagree even on some of the more rudimentary features of any interpretation. The discussion, at the very least, concerns itself with topics close to Plato's heart in many of the later dialogues, such as Being, Sameness, Difference, and Unity; but any attempt to extract interpretation from these passages invites contention. It is likely that the second part of the Parmenides will remain an enigma for readers of Plato for some time to come. Unfortunately, it is equally likely that a true understanding of Plato's mature thought will always be incomplete without a better understanding of these, so far recalcitrant, passages

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Plato's Parmenides and the Dilemma of Participation

Ancient Greece

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