Work · Ancient Greek
Parmenides
The young Socrates is drawn by Parmenides into the difficulties of the theory of Forms.
Introduction
The dialogue imagines a meeting in Athens between the young Socrates and the aged Parmenides with his pupil Zeno. In the first part Parmenides raises objections to the theory of Forms, among them the regress later called the “Third Man”: if large things share in a Form of Largeness, a further Form seems to be needed, and so on without end. In the second, much longer part he practises a demanding exercise on the hypothesis “if the One is” and “if the One is not”, with contradictory results. Whether Plato is criticising his own theory is disputed; the Neoplatonists read the second part as a theology of the One.
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Connections
Responds to
- On Naturec. 475 BCE · Parmenides
Taken up in
- Metaphysicsc. 340 BCE · Aristotle
- Enneadsc. 270 · Plotinus
- Science of Logic1812 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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