Plato's Parmenides This page intentionally left blank PLATO'S PARMENIDES Constance C. Meinwald New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1991 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1991 by Constance C. Meinwald Published by Oxford University Press 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meinwald, Constance C. Plato's Parmenides / Constance C. Meinwald. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-506445-3 1. Plato. Parmenides. 2. Reasoning. 3. Socrates. 4. Zeno, of Elea. I. Title. B378.M45 1991 90-35419 184—dc20 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My work on Plato's Parmenides began as a 1987 doctoral dissertation at Princeton University. The present book was completed after I had joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Thus, i have received help on this project from many individuals. First of all, I owe thanks to Michael Frede for helping me choose my topic and for his insightful advice over the years. But others at Princeton have given vital help, especially David Furley, Sally Haslanger, Mark Johnston, and Wolfgang Mann. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Chi- cago area; Elizabeth Asmis, Anil Gupta, Richard Kraut, Ian Mueller, and Nicholas White all read work in progress and discussed it with me. I am very happy to be able to thank the anonymous reader for Oxford University Press, whose sympathetic understanding of my manuscript and many useful comments were deeply appreciated. I must acknowledge my debts to two institutions. I owe thanks to Princeton for generous support during my years as a graduate student, and for having me back as a Visiting Fellow in the spring of 1988. Another important debt is less tangible: the faculty of the Program in Classical Philosophy and its visitors have been my models in ap- proaching ancient texts. I must also acknowledge the support of the University of Illinois at Chicago. This book took its present form dur- ing the spring of 1988, thanks to a grant from the Campus Research Board; the Philosophy Department relieved me of teaching responsi- bilities during the spring quarter of 1989 as well. I am deeply grateful to the members of the department for the importance they attach to nurturing the research of the junior faculty. Chicago C.C.M. January 1990 This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS 1. Introduction 3 2. The Dialectical Scheme 28 3. The In-Relation-To Qualifications 46 4. The Exercise Interpreted: The First Section 76 5. The Second Section of Arguments 95 6. On 155e4-157b5 117 7. The Third and Fourth Sections of Argument 131 8. The Results from the Negative Hypothesis 145 9. The Resolutions of the Difficulties 153 10. Epilogue 164 Notes 173 Bibliography 185 Index 189 This page intentionally left blank Plato's Parmenides This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction Plato's Parmenides today finds itself in a strange position: it is clearly an important work, but its import remains remarkably unclear. The difficulty of analyzing this text is due, in part, to its complicated struc- ture. Within three frames we find the dialogue proper, itself consisting of two parts connected by a brief transitional section. The first part of the main dialogue is a series of rather brief exchanges enlivened by humor and some dramatic incident; the second part consists of almost thirty Stephanas pages of obscure and unadorned argument.' These two parts are so strikingly different that there can be no question of their being coordinate episodes of the same kind. Yet when deciding what, exactly, the character of each part is and how they fit together to make up a whole, scholars still express doubt.2 There is considerable interest in resolving this doubt. For one thing, certain external considerations hint at the importance of the Parmen- ides. These include the evidence of other dialogues by Plato: Socrates refers with deep respect, in both the Theaetetus and the Sophist, to Parmenides' performance on what must be the occasion depicted in our dialogue.3 Also, the sheer compositional effort required to produce this text must have been enormous, and we would not expect Plato to expend such effort on a minor work. These hints are confirmed and given meaning in the first part of the Parmenides. This celebrated section presents a series of difficulties confronting Socrates as he tries to uphold views we had come to think of as constituting Plato's own theory of forms (as expressed in the Republic and the Phaedo). Clearly, the Parmenides represents a crucial moment in Plato's thought. What was Plato's own attitude at this time? Did he know how to respond to the difficulties raised in the first part of the dialogue and, if so, what course did he propose? The natural starting point in answering these questions is to study the dialogue itself, to see whether 3 4 Plato's Parmenides the rest of the text addresses the problems. Indeed, Plato has indicated that this approach is correct: he makes Parmenides tell Socrates that the reason he has gotten into trouble is that he has posited his forms too early, before having "exercised"; the second part of the dialogue then consists of a demonstration of the kind of exercise Parmenides recommends. Since Plato meant the second part of the dialogue to bear on the problems of the first, we must understand the new exer- cise it contains if we wish to assess Plato's response to those prob- lems. But understanding the second part of the dialogue has been the sin- gle most intractable task in interpreting the Parmenides, if not in Plato scholarship as a whole. We are faced with an unbroken series of ar- guments—many seemingly so bad as to be embarrassing—systemati- cally arranged to produce apparently contradictory conclusions. Inter- preters are so divided about what this exercise achieves that disagreement still persists over whether it has any positive results at all. In my own interpretation of the exercise, which constitutes the heart of this study, I approach the arguments systematically and read them in the light of Parmenides' methodological remarks. What results is a positive and crucial innovation—a distinction between two kinds of predica- tion—whose application enables us to recognize that the exercise con- sists of good arguments whose conclusions are not contradictory after all. Since the point of the exercise is, in large part, to enable us to deal with the problems of the first part of the dialogue, I have placed my analysis of the second part of the Parmenides in its natural context: I precede it with a preliminary discussion of the famous problems, and I return, once I have the results of the second part of the dialogue in hand, to consider how they bear on the problems. By this point, I will have accumulated a body of evidence for my characterization of Pla- to's position at the moment of writing the Parmenides. An epilogue sets the results of my study in a larger context, namely, our under- standing of Plato's development. In this chapter, I begin with a preliminary discussion of each of the two parts of the dialogue, and of some well-known ways of interpret- ing them. This will prepare the reader for the scheme (outlined at the end of the chapter) that underlies my particular approach. introduction 5 The First Part of the Dialogue The first part of the Parmenides (if we break off before the description of the new exercise, perhaps in 135d3, just after Parmenides has con- gratulated Socrates on his efforts) has the appearance of a work com- plete in itself; in particular it resembles the canonical "Socratic" dia- logue. The general pattern of these dialogues is familiar. Some philosophically interesting subject comes up in conversation. One of the persons present either holds himself out as an expert on this sub- ject, or for some other reason can be expected to be one. This person enters into conversation with Socrates about the subject matter of his supposed expertise, answering a series of questions. By dialogue's end, the interlocutor has revealed that he is not in a position to uphold his views: his confusion is such that he has not managed to avoid contra- dicting himself. The twist in our dialogue is that Socrates (here a youth) is the inter- locutor, while the venerable Parmenides is the questioner. Socrates holds himself out as an expert on forms by his aggressive criticism of Parmenides' Eleatic comrade Zeno. For Socrates' criticisms are made from the standpoint of a view relying crucially on assertions about forms, and these forms are special theoretical entities. Someone who makes controversial assertions about special theoretical entities the ba- sis for his attacks on others ought to be an expert on the relevant theory, so Socrates ought to understand forms. But, notoriously, when Parmenides questions him further about his views on forms, Socrates falls repeatedly into difficulties and admits his perplexity. The resemblance of this fragment of the Parmenides to an early dialogue taken in its entirety gives it the air of something one might study by itself.