ΠΑΡΜΕΝΙΔΗΣ
Benjamin Jowett
Plato · Benjamin Jowett
Narrator: CEPHALUS of Clazomenae
Also present: GLAUCON, ANTIPHON, PYTHODORUS (indirect speakers); FRIENDS FROM CLAZOMENAE
Scene: outside the city walls of Athens at the house of Pythodorus, during the Great Panathenaea
The Parmenides is the most demanding and enigmatic of Plato's dialogues. It depicts a dramatic meeting in which the aged Parmenides and his pupil Zeno visit Athens and engage a very young Socrates, who eagerly puts forward the theory of Forms — only to have the venerable Eleatic gently take it apart.
In the first part Parmenides presses a series of famous objections. How can many things participate in one Form without it being split among them? Does explaining the many large things by Largeness not require a further Form to cover them all, and so on without end — the 'third man' regress? Are there Forms of trivial or base things? And if the Forms are utterly separate, how can we, in this world, ever know them, and how can the divine know us? Socrates is left unable to answer, yet Parmenides insists the theory cannot simply be abandoned, for without stable Forms thought and discourse themselves collapse.
The second, longer part is a relentless dialectical exercise in which Parmenides examines the consequences of supposing that 'the one is' and that 'the one is not', running through a sequence of intricate, often contradictory hypotheses about the One and its relation to being. Whether this is a logical puzzle, a parody, or a serious metaphysics has been argued ever since.
The Neoplatonists had no doubt: they read the hypotheses as a map of all reality, taking the first — a One so transcendent that it cannot even be said to be — as the supreme revelation of the One beyond being. Proclus and Damascius wrote great commentaries on it, and for them this baffling text was the summit of Plato's theology.
In the library: the complete Parmenides, with the critique of the Forms and the dialectical hypotheses.
From the Plato Scroll Encyclopedia · open this entry in the reader
We had come from our home at Clazomenae to Athens, and met Adeimantus and Glaucon in the Agora. Welcome, Cephalus, said Adeimantus, taking me by the hand; is there anything which we can do for you in Athens?
Yes; that is why I am here; I wish to ask a favour of you.
What may that be? he said.
I want you to tell me the name of your half brother, which I have forgotten; he was a mere child when I last came hither from Clazomenae, but that was a long time ago; his father’s name, if I remember rightly, was Pyrilampes?
Yes, he said, and the name of our brother, Antiphon; but why do you ask?
Let me introduce some countrymen of mine, I said; they are lovers of philosophy, and have heard that Antiphon was intimate with a certain Pythodorus, a friend of Zeno, and remembers a conversation which took place between Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides many years ago, Pythodorus having often recited it to him.
Quite true.
And could we hear it? I asked.
Nothing easier, he replied; when he was a youth he made a careful study of the piece; at present his thoughts run in another direction; like his grandfather Antiphon he is devoted to horses. But, if that is what you want, let us go and look for him; he dwells at Melita, which is quite near, and he has only just left us to go home.
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The Athenian who turned Socratic conversation into a written philosophy and founded the Academy.
Plato was born around 428 BCE into a wealthy and politically prominent Athenian family; through his mother Perictione the family traced kinship to the lawgiver Solon, and his relatives Critias and Charmides were among the oligarchs of the Thirty. A late tradition says his given name was Aristocles and that 'Plato' — from the word for 'broad' — was a nickname. He grew up during the long agony of the Peloponnesian War and came of age amid the violence and disillusion that followed Athens' defeat.
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