ΠΑΡΜΕΝΙΔΗΣ
H.N. Fowler (Loeb, 1926)
Plato · H.N. Fowler (Loeb, 1926)
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
Ceph: When we came from our home at Clazomenae to Athens, we met Adeimantus and Glaucon in the market-place. Adeimantus took me by the hand and said, Welcome, Cephalus if there is anything we can do for you here, let us know. Why, said I, that is just why I am here, to ask a favour of you. Tell us, said he, what it is. And I said, What was your half-brother’s name? I don’t remember. He was only a boy when I came here from Clazomenae before and that is now a long time ago. His father’s name, I believe, was Pyrilampes. Yes, said he. And what is his own name? Antiphon. Why do you ask? These gentlemen, I said, are fellow-citizens of mine, who are very fond of philosophy. They have heard that this Antiphon had a good deal to do with a friend of Zeno ’s named Pythodorus, that Pythodorus often repeated to him the conversation which Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides once had together, and that he remembers it. That is true, said he. Well, I said, we should like to hear it. There is no difficulty about that, said he for when he was a youth he studied it with great care though now he devotes most of his time to horses, like his grandfather Antiphon. If that is what you want, let us go to him. He has just gone home from here, and he lives close by in Melite.
Continue reading in Plato Scroll →
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.
Plato · H.N. Fowler (Loeb, 1926). Each edition has its page, the reader and a plain-text file:
PLATO SCROLL