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Title: Plato's Parmenides
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
List Price: $78.00
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| Plato's Parmenides by Oxford University Press, USA Simply the best | Meinwald's is a ground breaking work on the Parmenides whose central lesson is that some of the dialogue's later pages shed light on what's going on in the early bits. Sounds uncontroversial? You bet. No one's ever taken care to work out this simple idea into something workable. Meinwald tries, and in the course of doing so presents us with an elegant reading of the dialogue. That does not make her book easy to digest or 100% correct. I think it's far from either. But it's still the most helpful book on the dialogue you'll ever lay eyes on. Why? Because working out whether to agree or disagree with Meinwald's profound reading will make you think extremely hard about what this dialogue is trying to tell us. Meinwald's book will quickly teach you to reject the easy fixes. Already in that regard it's much more congenial to Plato's original than most other things written about it. This book does not talk about midwifery: it accomplishes it.
That said, the book is not for the faint hearted. To begin with, unless you know Greek, a good many of the book's finer (and finest) points will be lost on you. You'll get irritated at the undecipherable font.
Moreover, if you're coming to the dialogue for the first time, simply skip this. You'll be overwhelmed in a most unhelpful way. Rather go with Mary Luise Gill's 'Parmenides' (published by Hackett), which will equip you with a solid working base on most issues the dialogue has triggered. And hey, then it's quality time. Then you can start brooding and cooking up your own theory of what this most difficult of all dialogues is meant to tell us. And then Meinwald's gem can become your trusted companion. | | Plato's Parmenides by Oxford University Press, USA Ignores Plato's own explanation | | For centuries people have been puzzled by the "Parmenides," the dialogue in which Plato raised objections against his own theory of forms. Even in late antiquity people didn't know what was going on. Many conjectures have been presented, but every one of them is wrong. I say this with such assurance because Plato actually gave us an explanation of what he was up to. This explanation hasn't been noticed because it is the sort of thing you can't see unless you know what to look for. I didn't see it myself for nearly twenty years, but now that I do see it, it is hard to understand how I failed to see it before. The explanation occurs about where we would expect to find an explanation, namely immediately after all of the objections have been presented (134e-135c). Here is a rough paraphrase of that explanation, designed to make Plato's views and feelings clearer: "Nearly everyone who hears these wretched objections is persuaded by them and concludes that forms do not exist. I [Plato] have argued with these people repeatedly, but to no avail. They stubbornly refuse to change their minds because they believe that they have hit upon a very significant truth, and even when I can get them to concede that forms exist, they contend that they are unknowable. Apparently, only those who are extremely intelligent (like me and unlike them) will see that these objections are wrong and that forms do exist and can be known. Anyway, if the forms did not exist, then all thought and discourse would be impossible." If anyone has another, better interpretation of this passage, I'd like to hear it. But if I am right, Meinwald is wrong. She (along with everyone else) takes the Third Man to be a self-critique, but this passage strongly suggests that it was a critique raised by others. And she takes its import to be that Plato revised, but this passage suggests that Plato had no intention of revising. Anyway, revision is not the issue here. Plato's opponents wanted him to ABANDON his theory, not revise it. Goodbye to Meinwald's interpretation. | | Plato's Parmenides by Oxford University Press, USA Product Description | 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. |
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