Read complete books and articles on: Parmenides (Plato's Dialogue)

Plato - plāˈtō, 427?–347 b.c., Greek philosopher. Plato's teachings have been among the most influential in the history of Western civilization.

Life

Plato - plāˈtō, 427?–347 b.c., Greek philosopher. Plato's teachings have been among the most influential in the history of Western civilization.

Life

After pursuing the liberal studies of his day, he became in 407 b.c. a pupil and friend of Socrates. From about 388 b.c. he lived for a time at the court of Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse. On his return to Athens, Plato founded a school, the Academy, where he taught mathematics and philosophy until his death. His teaching was interrupted by two more visits to Syracuse (367 and 361 b.c.), which he made in the vain hope of seeing his political ideals realized in Sicily.

Works and Philosophy

Plato was a superb writer, and his works are part of the world's great literature. His extant work is in the form of dialogues and epistles. Some of the dialogues and many of the epistles attributed to him are known to be spurious, while others are doubtful. In the various dialogues he touched upon almost every problem that has occupied subsequent philosophers. The dialogues are divided into three groups according to the probable order of composition.

Early Works

The earliest group of dialogues, called Socratic, include chiefly the Apology, which presents the defense of Socrates; the Meno, which asks whether virtue can be taught; and the Gorgias, which concerns the absolute nature of right and wrong. These early dialogues present Socrates in conversations that illustrate his main ideas—the unity of virtue and knowledge and of virtue and happiness. Each dialogue treats a particular problem without necessarily resolving the issues raised.

Philosophical Themes and Mature Works

Plato was always concerned with the fundamental philosophical problem of working out a theory of the art of living and knowing. Like Socrates, Plato began convinced of the ultimately harmonious structure of the universe, but he went further than his mentor in trying to construct a comprehensive philosophical scheme. His goal was to show the rational relationship between the soul, the state, and the cosmos. This is the general theme of the great dialogues of his middle years: the Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Philebus. In the Republic he shows how the operation of justice within the individual can best be understood through the analogy of the operation of justice within the state, which Plato proceeds to set out in his conception of the ideal state. However, justice cannot be understood fully unless seen in relation to the Idea of the Good, which is the supreme principle of order and truth.

It is in these dialogues that the famous Platonic Ideas (see realism) are discussed. Plato argued for the independent reality of Ideas as the only guarantee of ethical standards and of objective scientific knowledge. In the Republic and the Phaedo he postulates his theory of Forms. Ideas or Forms are the immutable archetypes of all temporal phenomena, and only these Ideas are completely real; the physical world possesses only relative reality. The Forms assure order and intelligence in a world that is in a state of constant flux. They provide the pattern from which the world of sense derives its meaning.

The supreme Idea is the Idea of the Good, whose function and place in the world of Ideas is analogous to that of the sun in the physical world. Plato saw his task as that of leading men to a vision of the Forms and to some sense of the highest good. The principal path is suggested in the famous metaphor of the cave in the Republic, in which man in his uninstructed state is chained in a world of shadows. However, man can move up toward the sun, or highest good, through the study of what Plato calls dialectic. The supreme science, dialectic, is a method of inquiry that proceeds by a constant questioning of assumptions and by explaining a particular idea in terms of a more general one until the ultimate ground of explanation is reached.

The Republic, the first Utopia in literature, asserts that the philosopher is the only one capable of ruling the just state, since through his study of dialectic he understands the harmony of all parts of the universe in their relation to the Idea of the Good. Each social class happily performs the function for which it is suited; the philosopher rules, the warrior fights, and the worker enjoys the fruits of his labor. In the Symposium, perhaps the most poetic of the dialogues, the path to the highest good is described as the ascent by true lovers to eternal beauty, and in the Phaedo the path is viewed as the pilgrimage of the philosopher through death to the world of eternal truth.

Late Works

Many of the late dialogues are devoted to technical philosophic issues. The most important of these are the Theaetetus; the Parmenides, which deals with the relation between the one and the many; and the Sophist, which discusses the nature of nonbeing. Plato's longest work, the Laws, written during his middle and late periods, discusses in practical terms the nature of the state.

Bibliography

See translation of the dialogues by B. Jowett, ed. by D. J. Allan and H. E. Daley (4 vol., 4th ed., rev. 1953); A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (1927); R. Bambrough, ed., New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (1965); G. Vlastos, Platonic Studies (1973); G. F. Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry (1987); Jacob A. Kline, A Commentary on Plato's Meno (1989); C. Hampton, Pleasure, Knowledge, and Being: An Analysis of Plato's Philebus (1990).

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7 of the Best Books and Articles on: Parmenides (Plato's Dialogue)

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Parmenides of Plato (1934) » Read Now
by Plato, A. E. Taylor. 166 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library
2.

Plato's Reception of Parmenides » Read Now
by John A. Palmer. 294 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library

John Palmer presents a new and original account of Plato's uses and understanding of his most important Presocratic predecessor, Parmenides. Adopting an innovative approach to the appraisal of intellectual influence, Palmer first explores the Eleatic underpinnings of central elements in Plato's...
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John Palmer presents a new and original account of Plato's uses and understanding of his most important Presocratic predecessor, Parmenides. Adopting an innovative approach to the appraisal of intellectual influence, Palmer first explores the Eleatic underpinnings of central elements in Plato's middle-period epistemology and metaphysics. He then shows how in the later dialogues Plato confronts various sophistic appropriations of Parmenides while simultaneously developing his own deepened understanding. Along the way Palmer gives fresh readings of Parmenides' poem in the light of the Platonic reception, and discusses Plato's view of Parmenides' relation to such key figures as Xenophanes, Zeno, and Gorgias. By tracing connections among the uses of Parmenides over the course of several dialogues, Palmer both demonstrates his fundamental importance to the development of Plato's thought and furthers understanding of central problems in Plato's own philosophy.
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3.

Form and Argument in Late Plato (includes Ch. 1 "Unity in the Parmenides: The Unity of the Parmenides") » Read Now
by Christopher Gill, Mary Margaret McCabe. 350 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library

Why did Plato put his philosophical arguments into dialogues, rather than presenting them in a plain and readily understandable fashion? A group of distinguished scholars here offer answers to this question by studying the relation between form and argument in his late dialogues. These penetrating...
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Why did Plato put his philosophical arguments into dialogues, rather than presenting them in a plain and readily understandable fashion? A group of distinguished scholars here offer answers to this question by studying the relation between form and argument in his late dialogues. These penetrating studies show that the literary structure of the dialogues is of vital importance in the ongoing interpretation of Plato.
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4.

Plato's Doctrine of Ideas (1909) » Read Now
by J. A. Stewart. 207 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library

...65 The Parmenides . . . . . . . 68...life, with different subjects, in Dialogues differently staged, phrases and...criticism we find nothing in the Dialogues of Plato to...
5.

Plato on the Self-Predication of Forms: Early and Middle Dialogues » Read Now
by John Malcolm. 234 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library

In this book, Malcolm presents a new and radical interpretation of Plato's earlier dialogues. He argues that the few cases of self-predication contained therein are acceptable simply as statements concerning universals, and that therefore Plato is not vulnerable in these cases to the Third Man...
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In this book, Malcolm presents a new and radical interpretation of Plato's earlier dialogues. He argues that the few cases of self-predication contained therein are acceptable simply as statements concerning universals, and that therefore Plato is not vulnerable in these cases to the Third Man Argument. In considering the middle dialogues, Malcolm takes a conservative stance, rejecting influential current doctrines which portray the Forms as being not self-predicative. He shows that the middle dialogues do indeed take Forms to be both universals and paradigms, and thus to exemplify themselves. The author goes on to consider why Plato should have been unsuccessful in avoiding self-predication. He shows that Plato's concern to explain how the truths of mathematics can indeed be true played an important role in his postulation of the Form as an Ideal Individual. The author concludes with the claim that reflection on the ambiguity of the notion of the "Standard Yard" may help us to appreciate why Plato failed to distinguish Forms as universals from Forms as paradigm cases.
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6.

The Essence of Plato's Philosophy (1933) (includes "The Parmenides" in Ch. I) » Read Now
by Constantin Ritter, Adam Alles. 416 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library
7.

The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues » Read Now
by Ruby Blondell. 452 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library

This book is an interpretation of Plato in general, and several dialogues in particular, from the point of view of dramatic characterization. It thus forms part of the growing movement towards reading Plato "dramatically", as opposed to reading him as if he wrote treatises like most philosophers. At...
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This book is an interpretation of Plato in general, and several dialogues in particular, from the point of view of dramatic characterization. It thus forms part of the growing movement towards reading Plato "dramatically", as opposed to reading him as if he wrote treatises like most philosophers. At the same time, it is intended to show traditional "analytical" philosophical interpreters the significance of such "literary" features for understanding the philosophical issues at stake. Its overall goal is to bridge the gulf still existing between such interpreters and more "literary" readers.
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