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The Parmenides and the ‘Third Man’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

R. S. Bluck
R. S. Bluck
Affiliation:
Queen Mary College, University of London
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Extract

In a recent article in the Philosophical Review (lxiii [1954], 319 ff.) Professor Gregory Vlastos has given an acute analysis of the ‘Third Man’ Argument as it appears in the Parmenides for which all Platonic scholars will be grateful. In view of the importance of the article and the interest that it has aroused, I should like to offer one or two criticisms of his conclusions.

Type
Articles
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 6 , Issue 1-2 , May 1956 , pp. 29 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1956

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References

page 29 note 1 This notation (F-ness) is perhaps a little misleading, since Plato's Forms were not just universals, as the Self-Predication Assumption itself shows: cf. my Plato's Phaedo (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1955), 174rr.

page 30 note 1 Vlastos claims that Plato might have made this reply even without understanding the nature of the Non-identity Assumption. This seems rather doubtful.

page 30 note 2 Plato makes this assumption, of course, because as yet (a) no distinction had been made—for better or for wors—between substance and attribute, and (b) it was supposed that objects of knowledge must be ‘real’, and only a ‘thing’ could be real. A Form was, primarily, a perfect character, but as being real it was also a thing. If the whole object of Plato's ‘separation’ of ‘good’, ‘just', and the like was to make them real things (so as to justify Socrates’ belief in them), it is unlikely that Plato was wholly unaware that he was turning characters into things possessing characters, though he may not have seen the logical implications of this, since his primary interests were still ontological and epistemo-logical. No doubt it is also true, as Vlastos observes (p. 339), that Plato had not diought out how self-predication would apply to Forms like Change, Becoming, and Perishing.

page 31 note 1 A frivolous argument is similarly brought in to supplement a serious one in countering the suggestion that Forms may be simply thoughts (132 c).

page 31 note 2 Trans. Hackforth, R. (Plato's Examination of Pleasure, 20).Google Scholar

page 32 note 1 Plato and Parmenides, 98.

page 32 note 2 Ibid. 99. This is perhaps begging the question: according to the ontology of the Republic, human knowledge, as being a thing of this world, would be not only imperfect, but imperfectly real.

page 32 note 3 viz. that Mastership (the Form) has as its correlate the Form Slavery, so that we may say, in that sense, that it is ‘Mastership of Slavery Itself’.

page 32 note 4 Vlastos, 347.

page 32 note 5 Eud. Eth. 1245 b 16 ff.

page 32 note 6 De caelo B, ch. 12.

page 32 note 7 133 c. Cf. my article in C.Q. N.S. iii (1953). 51.Google Scholar

page 35 note 1 Metaphysics A, 99 1 a.

page 35 note 2 quoted by Alexander, in Met. 990 b 15.

page 35 note 3 Plato and Parmenides, p. 88. Cornford holds that the first version of the Argument fails simply because it is assumed that Largeness is itself a large thing, but that if that assumption were correct, ‘then it [Largeness] is just one more member of the class of large things, and there will be the same reason to demand a second Form for it to partake of as there was to demand the original Form for the many to partake of.

page 36 note 1 C.Q. N.S. iii (1953), 83.Google Scholar

page 36 note 2 Op. cit. 244–5.

page 37 note 1 Since this went to press, further articles on the ‘Third Man’ have appeared in Philosophical Review, lxiv. 405 ff., and lxv. 72 ff. I hope to discuss these later, but they do not affect my present argument.Google Scholar