Plato S Parmenides Reconsidered

Plato's Parmenides Reconsidered offers a very accessible, detailed, and historically-sensitive account of Plato's Parmenides. Against the prevailing scholarly wisdom, he illustrates conclusively that Parmenides is a satirical dialogue in which Plato attempts to expose the absurd nature of the doctrines and method of his philosophical opponents.

Plato's Parmenides Reconsidered offers a very accessible, detailed, and historically-sensitive account of Plato's Parmenides. Against the prevailing scholarly wisdom, he illustrates conclusively that Parmenides is a satirical dialogue in which Plato attempts to expose the absurd nature of the doctrines and method of his philosophical opponents.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov’s analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov’s interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.

A rigorous investigation of Socrates' early education, pinpointing the thought that led Socrates to turn from natural science to the study of morality, ethics, and politics

Miller's study demonstrates the value of integrating hermeneutic reading and conceptual analysis. His interpretation works out in detail the purpose and argument of the Parmenides as a whole and provides a new point of departure for discussion of its place in the Platonic corpus. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Parmenides is notorious for the criticisms it directs against Plato's own Theory of Forms, as presented in the middle period. But the second and major portion of the dialogue has generally been avoided, despite its being offered as Plato's response to the problems; the text seems intractably obscure, appearing to consist of a series of bad arguments leading to contradictory conclusions. Carefully analyzing these arguments and the methodological remarks which precede them, Meinwald shows that to understand Plato's response we need to recognize his important distinction between two kinds of predication. Read in the light of this distinction, the arguments can be seen to be sound, and the contradictions merely apparent. Meinwald then proceeds to demonstrate the direct application of Plato's crucial innovation in solving the problems of the first part of the dialogue, including the infamous Third Man. On Meinwald's interpretation, the new distinction is associated with developments in metaphysics which take Plato well beyond the problems commonly thought to tell against Platonism.