Podcast episode
June 26, 2018
Episode 36: Plato’s Parmenides and Metaphysics
Plato’s dialogue the Parmenides is a one-off. In it we see the elderly Parmenides (yes, him, the pre-Socratic philosopher) come to Athens and enter into dialectic with none other than the youthful Socrates as he is just setting out to pursue philosophy. After crushing the theory of forms, Parmenides decides that Socrates’ dialectical skills need some work, and he gives him a lesson in dialectic by expounding some of the most troubling and difficult-to-interpret chains of reasoning ever put to paper. In the process he seems to make not only Socrates’ theory, but his own theory, and everything else, impossible.
In this episode we look at the dialogue from a few angles, discussing the seminal article of E.R. Dodds which alerted the world to the metaphysical reading of the Parmenides lying coiled at the heart of Late Platonism, we run through the first hypothesis of the dialogue, and then expound the significance of this work for the later development of apophatic writing and belief in a truly ineffable transcendent principle arising in late antiquity.
Works Discussed in this Episode:
Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy Podcast has an excellent episode devoted to the arguments of the first part of Plato’s Parmenides.
Dodds, E. R. (1928). ‘The Parmenides of Plato and the Neoplatonic One’, The Classical Quarterly 22 : 129-142.
Plato speaks of the Good beyond being (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας) at Republic 509b8-9; in the episode I actually fall under the spell of the Late Platonists, and refer to the Good as the One – while our later authors conflate the two principles, this is not necessarily the case with Plato himself.
Plotinus says that Plato’s Parmenides is clearer than Parmenides the historical philosopher: Enn. V.1[10]8.24.
Recommended Reading:
A good introduction to Plato’s Parmenides from an analytic standpoint can be found at the Stanford online encyclopedia of philosophy.
- Cherniss, H., 1932, ‘Parmenides and the Parmenides of Plato’, American Journal of Philology, 53: 122–138.
- Gill, C., and McCabe, M. M. (ed.), 1996, Form and Argument in Late Plato, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Havlicek, A., and Karfik, F., 2005, Plato’s Parmenides: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium Platonicum Pragense, Prague: OIKOYMENH Publishers.
- Miller, M. H. Jr., 1986, Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Patterson, R., 1999, ‘Forms, Fallacies, and the Functions of Plato’s Parmenides’, Apeiron, 32: 89–106.
- Peck, A. L., 1953, ‘Plato’s Parmenides: Some Suggestions for its Interpretation’, The Classical Quarterly, 3/3: 126–150.
Themes
Apophatic Writing, Ineffablility, Late Antiquity, Late Platonism, Metaphysics, Parmenides, Philosophy, Plato, Plotinus
Bernie Lewin
October 12, 2019
From within my own Platonic bubble, I find very strange the notion that the Parmenides is used to demolish the Forms.
The first part of the dialogue is framed as the younger Socrates tutored by Parmenides, and then Parmenides encouraging the young Socrates to pursue dialectic to advance his philosophy. And then Parmenides uses dialectic to advance the same-and-other aspect of forms theory, with the suggestion that there is opposition-in-unity and that this might be hidden in the same, and likewise non-being found in being and so forth. Parmenides’ wonder full display of dialectic has brought this out, but not resolved it. But the some resolution comes (it is certainly claimed) when the argument is picked up at the end of the Sophist (p.258) by a student of Parmenides. Here we find things like: the other is existing and distributed in small bits throughout all existing things in their relation to one another.
Sometimes I wonder that the problem some folks have with understanding Platonic Forms is that they don’t see them connected to the discussions of unity, and then they don’t see the discussion of unity applying to the unity of every experience, distinction, thing, being and so forth. Every thing that we see/thing/call a delimited thing is not what it is not but is one. It is delimited as one, we might, by de-finit-ion. Every one expresses the form of one.
So firstly we have the Forms expressed in everything in this way. But then the teaching advances. The advance is that this oneness has the other hidden in it. I say ‘advance’, but it’s hard to find that Plato changed his mind. Modern readers of Plato seem to give insufficient attention to the binary themes in Plato and how they fuse with Forms theory. In the Republic, right after the Cave allegory, the first of the sciences is the science of the one, but this is not the ordinary one. It is the one that always has the ‘other’ nearby (as a contradiction). The next science is of the numbers. But this is not cardinal numbers. This is the procession of the odd and even, which is an alternation from just to excessive, back to just, and so on. Also consider the Platonic opposites. In Pheado, Socrates removes his shackles and talks about how pleasure follows pain. To think that this is not talking about the elementary form of things (and so an aspect of Form theory) is strange to me.
Now, if we return to the end of the Sophist, consider what is the running theme (joke!) in the Sophist? It is the methodological of definition, which is progressive binary division, where only one side is taken each time. It is a progressive asymmetrical binary. Right at the end, after saying that non-being permeates all being, we have a statement of monistic creation by god.
The way I read it is that this is all about showing the mathematics (which is all unsayable) beyond the dialectic. And it is showing its elementary form, which is the one(and not-one) unity, a contradiction, which in its essence as a coincidence of opposites is entirely unsayable. But that does not mean that we can’t point to it. In short, I confess that in this respect I see, say, Nicholas of Cusa as an entirely orthodox follower of Plato.
Earl Fontainelle
June 22, 2020
I’m with you, more or less. I remain baffled by the dialogue, however!