DISCUSSION NOTE

Vlastos on Pauline Predication

JOHN MALCOLM

In the period following his epoch-making attention to the ' was converted to the cause of what he has termed Pauline Predication.2 Sentences such as "Justice is pious" or "Fire is hot" seem, on the surface, to be attributing a characteristic to a Form - a situation labelled by Vlastos "ordinary predication" (AS,3 p. 273). But, Vlastos suggests, such cases are really to be read as assigning this property to instances of the Form. As applied to putative cases of self-predication,4 "F-ness is F" becomes, from the Pauline perspective, equivalent to "Necessarily, for all x, if x partakes of F-ness, x is F" (AS, p. 273; UVP, p. 235). In UVP (pp. 257-8) Vlastos urges that two notorious candidates for self-predication, "Justice is just" and "Piety is pious," at Prot. 330c and d respectively, must be read in the Pauline fashion. We may or may not agree with him here,5 but Vlastos proceeds to reject his former thesis that, for , all Forms are self-predicative. He will grant (pp. 259-63)

1 It hardly needs mentioning that the seminal paper was "The Third Man Argument in the ," Phil. Rev., 63 (1954), 319-49 (hereafter, TMAP). This article is reproduced in R.E. Allen (ed.), Studies in Plato's Metaphysics(London, 1 965 ),pp. 231-263. References in this paper are to the Allen volume. 2 This label is attributed to Sandra Peterson. Her version of Pauline Predication, which appeared in "A Reasonable Self-Predication Premise for the Third Man Argument," Phil. Rev., 82 (1973), 451-470, is different from that of Vlastos. In this paper I shall be concerned only with the Vlastos formulation. 3 All references in this article, unless otherwise specified, are to Platonic Studies (Princeton, 1973; 1981 ).They are abbreviated as follows: "UVP" for "The Unity of the in the "; "AS" for "An Ambiguity in the "; "TLPA" for "The 'Two-Level Paradoxes' in Aristotle." 4 I follow Vlastos, UVP, p. 258, note 97, in using the term "self-predication" to apply only to cases of "ordinary' predication, i.e., where F-ness is represented as an F thing. Whether F-ness can then be grouped together with the many Fs as the Third Man argument requires is, of course, quite another matter. One may, indeed, hold that unless the Form be grouped with the particulars there is not really a case of self-predication, but that is an issue beyond the scope of this paper. 5 Contra, see C. C. W. Taylor, Plato Protagoras (Oxford, 1976),pp. 118-120,and T. Irwin, Plato's Moral Theory, (Oxford, 1977),p. 306. But see A. Code and J. Dybikowski's review of Taylor in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 10 ( 1980),321-23, and Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 2nd. edition ( 198 1 p.), 441.

79 that Unity is one, Beauty is beautiful (Symp. 21cd) and Rest is at rest, but will exorcise almost all others on the grounds (p. 261) that they "yield blatant absurdity" and (p. 259) "shatter irreparably the coherence of Plato's theory." Such a radical treatment, however, cannot be justified from a reinterpretation of passages such as Prot. 330cd alone, for the general attribution of self-predication to Plato not only rests on certain grammatically explicit appearances in the corpus, but, as Vlastos earlier saw,6purports to follow from two key aspects of his : Model/ Copy and Degrees of Reality. So a mere reconstruction of the Protagoras excerpt, for example, has no bearing on this issue. Plato would remain committed to self-predication whether or not he is expressing this committment in the Protagoras. What is needed, therefore, is not an ad hoc attack on particular passages, but a general criterion for challenging all-pervasive self-predication in Plato - and Vlastos (p. 259) has such a criterion. Every Platonic Form has to be unitary and immobile. So any attribution which characterizes Forms as multiple or mobile must be rejected.7 Not only are Plurality and Change disbarred from self-predication (for Plurality cannot be plural, nor can Change change), even Forms for living things do not qualify, for their very nature involves change. Vlastos writes (p. 262), "For Plato thinks of all living things as moving, and if the Form of Animal were (an) animal the result would be a contradiction - that which by hypothesis cannot move moves. And the contradiction would be such an obvious one that he could hardly miss it." The first thing to note is that this inference which Vlastos reconstructs for Plato is a non-sequitur and it would not be to Plato's credit if he were, even occasionally, convinced by it. To see that the argument fails, one need only appreciate the distinction between (1) those characteristics a Form has because of its own particular nature as, for example, rationality and animality are contained in the nature of man (let us call these first-level characteristics) and (2) those characteristics which belong to the Form insofar as it is a Form - as, for example, unity and invariability. Let us call these second-level charac- teristiCS.8The former are part of the nature of man qua man, the latter characteristics of man qua Form. These are certainly distinguishable in that plurality and change can obtain as first-level characteristics without in any way compromising their inapplicability at the second level. For example, the Form of Decadity, when viewed as subject to self-predication, and

6 See TMAP, p. 248. 7 THe earlier Vlastos of the TMAP was also convinced by this reasoning (p. 251): "Had Plato recognized that all of his Forms are self-predicational, what would he have done with Forms like Change, Becoming and Perishing, which he did recognize as bona fide Forms? Clearly none of these could be self-predicational, for it they were, they would not be changeless, and would thus forfeit being." Vlastos then believed that Plato was committed to an assumption of which he was unaware. 8 Such a distinction is found in G. E. L. Owen, "Dialectic and Eristic in the Treatment of the Forms," in Aristotle on Dialectic (Oxford, 1970),p. 108. He has the levels in reverse. What I have called "first-level characteristics" he calls "B-predicates" and what I have called "second-level characteristics" he calls "A-predicates." Perhaps I am unduly in- fluenced by the range of answers to the "What is X?" question and the order in which they come in Aristotle's formulation of the P-distincion, but this seems to me counter- intuitive. Otherwise, I would have followed Owen's terminology.

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