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Plato's Theory of Ideas
This book by Sir William David Ross is the best account of Platos's famous theory of ideas. The author goes back to Plato's earlier dialogues and gives a detailed exposition of how the doctrine developed all through the dialogues, how he took up the teachings of Socrates and how Plato gave to it full consistence. Especially fine is his account of the Parmenides, one of Plato's mature works. This is the most difficult of all the dialogues and Ross sheds real clarity on it.
- GenresPhilosophy
251 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1951
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About the author
William David Ross
158 books18 followersSir William David Ross KBE, frequently published as W.D. Ross, was a philosopher, principally of ethics. He was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy (1923–1928), Provost of Oriel College, Oxford (1929–1947), Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford (1941–1944) and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (1944–1947). He was president of the Aristotelian Society (1939–1940), and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and was its President (1940-1944).
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August 27, 2016
Ross’s book, Plato’s Theory of Ideas, is probably the most thorough and even-handed single attempt to unravel the meaning of the Theory of Ideas (TOI). Ross starts with the important question of the order of the dialogues. This is important because a significant quarter of opinion on the TOI (including Bertrand Russell, see above) has held that in the Parmenides dialogue Plato produces an attack on the TOI which causes him to make a change or to abandon the theory in later works. The reason that the order of the dialogues is so important in this question is that most scholars see the Timaeus dialogue and the Seventh Letter as containing confirmations of the TOI. If these are placed after the Parmenides, some other interpretation must be given to Plato’s apparent attack on the TOI there (or of the views expressed in the later writings). Ross lists the order of the dialogues according to six different scholars. In five out of the six the Timaeus is listed after the Parmenides (the sixth doesn’t list the Timaeus at all). Ross’s own ordering is as follows:
Birth of Plato, 429-427
Charmides
Laches
Euthyphro
Hippias Major
First visit to Sicily, 389-388
Cratylus
Symposium
Phaedo
Republic
Phaedrus
Parmenides
Thaetetus
Second visit to Sicily, 367-366
Sophistes
Politicus
Third visit to Sicily, 361-360
Timaeus
Critias
Philebus
Seventh Letter, 353-352
Laws
Death of Plato, 348-347
With this ordering established, Ross proceeds to consider Plato’s presentation of the TOI in the dialogues which bear on the TOI in chronological order.
The Beginnings of the Theory
In the early dialogues Socrates is engaged in questioning a series of interlocutors on the definitions of certain things: “temperance” in the Charmides, “Courage” in the Laches, “piety” in the Euthyphro, “beauty” in the Hippias Major. Ross points to the Laches as presenting the germ of the TOI in the view that “to every common name there answers a single entity which is referred to in every occurrence of the name.” Ross sees the implications of this discussion as:
There is a real thing of which courage is a name
This is one thing and not another
Courage is a complex thing capable of being analyzed in its parts
He says that the Euthyphro is probably the first dialogue in which either of the words ιδέα or εidos appears: ‘Is not everything that is to be impious the same as itself, having impiety, a single Form (ιδέα)?’ I will try to compare this to Wittgenstein’s “Picture theory” of the Tractatus below. Ross presents a refutation of the theory of Ritter that there are six different senses in Plato’s use of the words ιδέα (Liddell and Scott (L&S): Ion. form) and εidos (L&S: that which is seen, the form, shape, figure). He concludes that “Plato means one and the same thing in every case; that nowhere is he speaking of concepts or of ‘the content of concepts’ but in every case of something which he considers perfectly objective, existing in its own right and not by virtue of our thinking of it.” He dismisses Ritter’s argument as a “product of nineteenth century conceptualism.”
Considering a passage in the Meno, Ross says that “The point is made that individual things are not always or in all relations instances of the same universals – that in some relations gold will appear no more beautiful than fig wood; but the point is not made that no particular is ever a true instance of an Idea, that the Idea is a standard or limit rather than a universal, and the relation of the individual to it is that of imitation, not of participation.”
The Phaedo
This dialogue presents the first sustained use of the TOI as a secondary theme to the primary argument for the immortality of the soul. In his discussion with Simmias, Socrates says, “If, as we are always saying, the beautiful exists, and the good, and every essence of that kind, and if we refer all our sensations to these, which we find existed previously and are now ours, and compare our sensations with these, is it not a necessary inference that just as these abstractions exist, so our souls existed before we were born; and if these abstractions do not exist, our argument is of no force? Is this the case and is it equally certain that provided these things exist our souls also existed before we were born, and that if these do not exist neither did our souls?” (79 D, Fowler’s translation) Since Socrates’s interlocutor here has no doubt about the certainty of the existence of souls, Plato here uses this as an argument for the existence of ideas. Not that souls are ideas, but that they are similarly eternal.
Later on in the dialogue Socrates says, “If anyone tells me that what makes a thing beautiful is its lovely colour, or its shape or anything else of the sort, I let all that go, for all those things confuse me, and I hold simple and plainly and perhaps foolishly to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful but the presence or communion (all it which you please0 of absolute beauty, however it may have been gained; about the way in which it happens, I make no positive statement as yet, but I do insist that beautiful things are made beautiful by beauty (100 D).” It is clear that by the time of the Phaedo, Plato is firmly committed to the TOI.
Ross asks the question as to whether the TOI in the Phaedo implies the separate existence of the Ideas. He suggests that the reference cited above (79 D) implies that either 1) Plato failed to recognize that the doctrine of anamnesis implies previous direct knowledge of disembodied Ideas or 2) that he saw and accepted this. Ross here cites Aristotle’s “consistent statement” that Plato believe d in “separate” Ideas and says “it is very difficult to suppose that after nineteen years spend in Plato’s School Aristotle could have been so misinformed about so important a matter.” Harold Cherniss has a very different answer on the credibility of Aristotle’s testimony. I will try to address that further on.
The Republic and the Phaedrus
The watershed that Ross finds in the Republic is that instead of declaring the particulars as real, he “from now on” is committed “until in the Sophistes he sees a better way” to “a false and dangerous disparagement of all particulars, in the supposed interest of Forms.” Ross goes through the passages on the Sun, the divided line, and the simile of the cave that I have presented above. He says that he wants to steer clear of interpreting these passages in light of what Plato says about the TOI in later dialogues. He says, “We are studying the development of Plato’s thought, and what we have to do is to try to discover what was in his mind when he wrote these passages.” With this Ross declares himself clearly on the side of the “Develomentalists” as opposed to the “Unitarians” represented by Shorey (The Unity of Plato’s Thought).
Ross provides a detailed evaluation of the divided line passage (509 D). Socrates here says, “Conceive then . . . as we were saying, that there are these two entities, and that one of them is sovereign over the intelligible order and region and the other over the world of the eye-ball, not to say the sky-ball, . . . Represent them then, as it were, by a line divided into town unequal sections and cut each section again in the same ratio . . . “
The two regions are each separated into two:
The visible or opinionable (δόξα)
a. The shadows of the original (εíκóνες)
b. The original particulars of the world
The intelligibles
a. The intermediate intelligibles (Διάνοια)
b. Νοûς (mind)
Ross feels that it is mathematics which Plato has in mind when he speaks about the intermediate intelligibles. Plato’s theory is that geometry consists not in deducing by pure logic from pure figures, but in apprehending the implication of figures drawn by hand. Ross says that Plato “opposes in advance two theories which have found favor in modern times – the empirical theory represented by Mill, which holds that geometry is an inductive science reasoning from observation of sensible figures and reaching approximately true generalizations about them and the rationalistic or logistic theory which regards geometry as proceeding by pure reasoning alone from axioms, definitions, and postulates relating to perfect geometrical figures, without any need for spatial intuition.” The alternative theory that Ross leaves out here, is one which I will discuss in more detail below, constructivism or intuitionism.
The distinction between the two classes of intelligibles is the distinction between science, which proceeds from hypothesis, and philosophy, which resorts to the ‘first principle of the universe . . . . the summit of the intelligible world is reached in discussion by one who aspires, to make his way in every case to essential reality, and perseveres until he has grasped by pure intelligence the very goodness itself.” But exactly how is this supposed to happen? How does one know one is in the presence of this “essential reality?”
The Phaedrus is not concerned with the TOI but Ross finds one passage which is suggestive. There (247 c 3 – e 2) the Ideas appear as “the colourless, figureless, intangible, truly real reality, seen only by the steersman of the soul, reason.” The soul there “sees justice itself, temperance itself, knowledge itself, not the knowledge that comes into being nor that which differs according as it is concerned with different so-called realities, but real knowledge that is concerned with real reality.”
The Parmenides and the Theaetetus
The Parmenides dialogue became an attractor for scholarly debate in the twentieth century. Taylor says that it “has always been regarded as an extremely puzzling” dialogue “and the most divergent views have been held about its main purpose.” Its first part presents the famous criticisms of the TOI by Parmenides and Socrates’s inability to defend it. The second part presents a series of examinations of eight theses about the One and Unity which come to apparently contradictory conclusions. Taylor says “Now it is quite certain that Plato never dreamed of denying the law of contradiction (Plato, the Man and His Work, p 850). Graham Priest, in a very recent article (http://gramata.univ-paris1.fr/Plato/s...) reaches the opposite conclusion. Shorey says that the dialogue “is not meant to be taken seriously” (The Unity of Plato’s Thought). Many others, including the present reviewer take it very seriously.
Vlastos started a storm of criticism with his “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides” article from 1954 (reprinted in Allen, Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics). Plato never named the argument in the first part of the dialogue for the infinite regress of forms, the TMA, Aristotle did, but it has been known as such ever since. Vlastos represents the argument thus:
If a number of things, a, b, c are all F, there must be a single, Form F-ness, in virtue of which we apprehend a,b,c, as all F.
If a,b,c and F-ness are all F, there must be another form, F-ness1, in virtue of which we apprehend a,b,c, and F-ness as all F.
This seems to lead to an infinite regress. Vlastos claims, however, that the logic is flawed, in that the regress occurs because of the replacement of F-ness by F-ness1. Vlastos proposed potential fixes to this argument using “self-predication”, but this need not concern us here. I actually think that Vlastos’s problem is manufactured by him, and not by Plato’s words. But a discussion of this would take us too far afield. The point that I want to emphasize here is that whether or not the TMA scuttles the TOI, or at least the “participation” version of it, Plato does not seem to have felt that it did so, since in the course of the discussion he has Parmenides say, “you are trying to define prematurely . . . each one of the Forms, before you are properly trained” and “Only an ingenious man will be able to understand that for each thing there is some Kind, a being itself by itself, but only someone even more remarkable will be able to discover it and teach it to another who has already thoroughly examined all these difficulties” (135 b, translation by Arnold Hermann and Sylvanna Chrysakopoulou). These words seem to recognize the problem posed by the “greatest difficulty” but imply that some smart thinking will overcome it. Considering that this “greatest difficulty” is here dropped and not taken up again in Plato’s work (as far as we know) I see this in another light, as a leap of faith, when reason has failed.
I think that the “greatest difficulty” hits the nail squarely on the head: “There are many difficulties as well, Parmenides said, but the greatest one is this: if someone were to say that the Forms – such as we claim they must be – are not even fit to be known, one would be unable to prove him wrong, unless the disputer happened to be widely experienced and not unintelligent, and also willing to follow the proof through numerous remote arguments. Otherwise, the person who requires that they be unknowable would remain unconvinced.” (133 b) I, for example, remain unconvinced 2,500 years later.
What Ross says about this is mostly measured and sane. He says that of the discussion in the first part, “It does not express doubt about the theory itself, but does express doubt about Plato’s earlier formulation of the theory” and concludes that “What he (Parmenides) says of the Theory of Ideas is that it is fundamentally true, but that it has been proclaimed without that regard to precision of thought which only a training in dialectic can give. The object of the ‘second part’ of the dialogue is to furnish an example of that training.”
I won’t go on to discuss the eight theses of the second part of the dialogue except to say that, by its unfolding of contradictory results from the assumptions that either a One exists or that a One does not exist, it reminds me mostly of the chess match played by our hero against Mr. Endon in Samuel Beckett’s hilarious novel, Murphy. Murphy, as part of his job at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (MMM) is required to visit each patient’s room every twenty minutes during the night to ensure that the patient had not “cut his throat” during the interim. So every twenty minutes Murphy enters Mr. Endon’s room, switches on the light, and makes a move on the chessboard arrayed in front of Mr. Endon on his bed. Mr. Endon has played his piece during the interim. Mr. Endon’s game (“Endon’s Affence”) consists in arraying his pieces fan-like onto the board and then withdrawing them as nearly as possible to their initial positions until the 43rd move, after which “White (Murphy) surrenders.”
In his discussion of the Theaetetus Ross suggests that since in the Parmenides Plato claims that, without the TOI, discourse would be impossible; in the Theaetetus, which Ross reckons was written not long after the first part of the Parmenides, Plato leaves the TOI and turns to developing a theory of knowledge, upon which to build the TOI. That the Theaetetus ends in aporia is for me a telling indicator of the shakiness of the TOI itself.
The Sophistes and the Politicus
The Sophistes is the first dialogue in which Socrates plays a minor role. The chief spokesman in the dialogue is instead an “Eleatic stranger” visiting Athens from parts influenced by the famous Eleatics, Parmenides and Zeno. But this Eleatic is a critical thinker who is not a thoroughgoing monist like Zeno. The dialogue starts out referencing “yesterday’s discussion” in the Theaetetus dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus. The discussion proceeds from the introductory question about the definition of the Philosopher, Statesman, and Sophist into a two-sided discussion between the young Theaetetus and the Eleatic stranger in which the argument really revolves around the old Parmenidian question of how “not-being” can exist. The opponents in this consideration of “not-being” are the materialists, who say that only that which is tangible is real, and the “Friends of the Forms.” Ross discusses four possibilities as to whom Plato is referring as the “Friends of the Forms”:
Megarians
Italian Pythagoreans
Platonists who had reverted to Pythagorean and Eleatic elements
Plato himself in an earlier phase.
Ross opts for option 4.
He translates a long passage (248 C4 – 249 b 12) to the effect that that change, life, soul, and understanding have a place in that which is perfectly real; that both change and unchanging things (the Ideas) have reality. This is not to be understood as a great departure from the supposedly monist theory of Parmenides. In fact it is recognition of both of the two “worlds” in Parmenides’s poem. The stranger then takes the discussion to the “greatest of the kinds of forms”: Being, Sameness, Difference, Motion, and Rest. The conclusion here is that, “while no Form can be ‘mixed’ with another in the sense of being identified with it, there are three Forms – Being, Sameness, and Difference – that can be predicated of all Forms, certain pairs of Forms of which one can be predicted of the other, and other pairs of Forms of which neither can be predicated of the other.” The science which discovers how Forms blend and apply to one another is the science of dialectic, philosophy.
The stranger then brings the discussion then to a truly anti-Parmenidian conclusion: that “not-being” exists, as opposed to what Parmenides has said, and that “When we speak of not-being, we speak, I think, not of something that is the opposite of being, but only of something different (257 B).” The conclusions about not-being suggest the importance of context in determining what a Form is “different from.” He begins with the proposition that all discourse depends on the weaving together of Forms by the speaker or thinker. For example, consider the statement “Theaetetus flies”. Theaetetus flying does not exist, but Theaetetus exists and flying exists, so in asserting Theaetetus flies “we are not asserting of him something that does not exist, but simply something that does not belong to him, something ‘other’, i.e. other than all the things that do belong to him.”
Ross concludes his discussion of the Sophistes with an appreciation of the “communion of the classes . . . the discovery of certain very obvious relations between five terms.” He says, “ . . . what is important is the establishment of the principle that the Forms are neither a collection of entities standing in no positive relations to each other, nor yet are capable of entering into all storms of relations to one another – that they form, indeed, a system.” This is suggestive of Wittgenstein’s “games form a family” from the Philosophical Investigations; ironical, because I think Wittgenstein’s constructivism represents a true alternative to the TOI.
For the rest of this review, see my blog: http://notesfrommylibrary.wordpress.c....
Birth of Plato, 429-427
Charmides
Laches
Euthyphro
Hippias Major
First visit to Sicily, 389-388
Cratylus
Symposium
Phaedo
Republic
Phaedrus
Parmenides
Thaetetus
Second visit to Sicily, 367-366
Sophistes
Politicus
Third visit to Sicily, 361-360
Timaeus
Critias
Philebus
Seventh Letter, 353-352
Laws
Death of Plato, 348-347
With this ordering established, Ross proceeds to consider Plato’s presentation of the TOI in the dialogues which bear on the TOI in chronological order.
The Beginnings of the Theory
In the early dialogues Socrates is engaged in questioning a series of interlocutors on the definitions of certain things: “temperance” in the Charmides, “Courage” in the Laches, “piety” in the Euthyphro, “beauty” in the Hippias Major. Ross points to the Laches as presenting the germ of the TOI in the view that “to every common name there answers a single entity which is referred to in every occurrence of the name.” Ross sees the implications of this discussion as:
There is a real thing of which courage is a name
This is one thing and not another
Courage is a complex thing capable of being analyzed in its parts
He says that the Euthyphro is probably the first dialogue in which either of the words ιδέα or εidos appears: ‘Is not everything that is to be impious the same as itself, having impiety, a single Form (ιδέα)?’ I will try to compare this to Wittgenstein’s “Picture theory” of the Tractatus below. Ross presents a refutation of the theory of Ritter that there are six different senses in Plato’s use of the words ιδέα (Liddell and Scott (L&S): Ion. form) and εidos (L&S: that which is seen, the form, shape, figure). He concludes that “Plato means one and the same thing in every case; that nowhere is he speaking of concepts or of ‘the content of concepts’ but in every case of something which he considers perfectly objective, existing in its own right and not by virtue of our thinking of it.” He dismisses Ritter’s argument as a “product of nineteenth century conceptualism.”
Considering a passage in the Meno, Ross says that “The point is made that individual things are not always or in all relations instances of the same universals – that in some relations gold will appear no more beautiful than fig wood; but the point is not made that no particular is ever a true instance of an Idea, that the Idea is a standard or limit rather than a universal, and the relation of the individual to it is that of imitation, not of participation.”
The Phaedo
This dialogue presents the first sustained use of the TOI as a secondary theme to the primary argument for the immortality of the soul. In his discussion with Simmias, Socrates says, “If, as we are always saying, the beautiful exists, and the good, and every essence of that kind, and if we refer all our sensations to these, which we find existed previously and are now ours, and compare our sensations with these, is it not a necessary inference that just as these abstractions exist, so our souls existed before we were born; and if these abstractions do not exist, our argument is of no force? Is this the case and is it equally certain that provided these things exist our souls also existed before we were born, and that if these do not exist neither did our souls?” (79 D, Fowler’s translation) Since Socrates’s interlocutor here has no doubt about the certainty of the existence of souls, Plato here uses this as an argument for the existence of ideas. Not that souls are ideas, but that they are similarly eternal.
Later on in the dialogue Socrates says, “If anyone tells me that what makes a thing beautiful is its lovely colour, or its shape or anything else of the sort, I let all that go, for all those things confuse me, and I hold simple and plainly and perhaps foolishly to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful but the presence or communion (all it which you please0 of absolute beauty, however it may have been gained; about the way in which it happens, I make no positive statement as yet, but I do insist that beautiful things are made beautiful by beauty (100 D).” It is clear that by the time of the Phaedo, Plato is firmly committed to the TOI.
Ross asks the question as to whether the TOI in the Phaedo implies the separate existence of the Ideas. He suggests that the reference cited above (79 D) implies that either 1) Plato failed to recognize that the doctrine of anamnesis implies previous direct knowledge of disembodied Ideas or 2) that he saw and accepted this. Ross here cites Aristotle’s “consistent statement” that Plato believe d in “separate” Ideas and says “it is very difficult to suppose that after nineteen years spend in Plato’s School Aristotle could have been so misinformed about so important a matter.” Harold Cherniss has a very different answer on the credibility of Aristotle’s testimony. I will try to address that further on.
The Republic and the Phaedrus
The watershed that Ross finds in the Republic is that instead of declaring the particulars as real, he “from now on” is committed “until in the Sophistes he sees a better way” to “a false and dangerous disparagement of all particulars, in the supposed interest of Forms.” Ross goes through the passages on the Sun, the divided line, and the simile of the cave that I have presented above. He says that he wants to steer clear of interpreting these passages in light of what Plato says about the TOI in later dialogues. He says, “We are studying the development of Plato’s thought, and what we have to do is to try to discover what was in his mind when he wrote these passages.” With this Ross declares himself clearly on the side of the “Develomentalists” as opposed to the “Unitarians” represented by Shorey (The Unity of Plato’s Thought).
Ross provides a detailed evaluation of the divided line passage (509 D). Socrates here says, “Conceive then . . . as we were saying, that there are these two entities, and that one of them is sovereign over the intelligible order and region and the other over the world of the eye-ball, not to say the sky-ball, . . . Represent them then, as it were, by a line divided into town unequal sections and cut each section again in the same ratio . . . “
The two regions are each separated into two:
The visible or opinionable (δόξα)
a. The shadows of the original (εíκóνες)
b. The original particulars of the world
The intelligibles
a. The intermediate intelligibles (Διάνοια)
b. Νοûς (mind)
Ross feels that it is mathematics which Plato has in mind when he speaks about the intermediate intelligibles. Plato’s theory is that geometry consists not in deducing by pure logic from pure figures, but in apprehending the implication of figures drawn by hand. Ross says that Plato “opposes in advance two theories which have found favor in modern times – the empirical theory represented by Mill, which holds that geometry is an inductive science reasoning from observation of sensible figures and reaching approximately true generalizations about them and the rationalistic or logistic theory which regards geometry as proceeding by pure reasoning alone from axioms, definitions, and postulates relating to perfect geometrical figures, without any need for spatial intuition.” The alternative theory that Ross leaves out here, is one which I will discuss in more detail below, constructivism or intuitionism.
The distinction between the two classes of intelligibles is the distinction between science, which proceeds from hypothesis, and philosophy, which resorts to the ‘first principle of the universe . . . . the summit of the intelligible world is reached in discussion by one who aspires, to make his way in every case to essential reality, and perseveres until he has grasped by pure intelligence the very goodness itself.” But exactly how is this supposed to happen? How does one know one is in the presence of this “essential reality?”
The Phaedrus is not concerned with the TOI but Ross finds one passage which is suggestive. There (247 c 3 – e 2) the Ideas appear as “the colourless, figureless, intangible, truly real reality, seen only by the steersman of the soul, reason.” The soul there “sees justice itself, temperance itself, knowledge itself, not the knowledge that comes into being nor that which differs according as it is concerned with different so-called realities, but real knowledge that is concerned with real reality.”
The Parmenides and the Theaetetus
The Parmenides dialogue became an attractor for scholarly debate in the twentieth century. Taylor says that it “has always been regarded as an extremely puzzling” dialogue “and the most divergent views have been held about its main purpose.” Its first part presents the famous criticisms of the TOI by Parmenides and Socrates’s inability to defend it. The second part presents a series of examinations of eight theses about the One and Unity which come to apparently contradictory conclusions. Taylor says “Now it is quite certain that Plato never dreamed of denying the law of contradiction (Plato, the Man and His Work, p 850). Graham Priest, in a very recent article (http://gramata.univ-paris1.fr/Plato/s...) reaches the opposite conclusion. Shorey says that the dialogue “is not meant to be taken seriously” (The Unity of Plato’s Thought). Many others, including the present reviewer take it very seriously.
Vlastos started a storm of criticism with his “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides” article from 1954 (reprinted in Allen, Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics). Plato never named the argument in the first part of the dialogue for the infinite regress of forms, the TMA, Aristotle did, but it has been known as such ever since. Vlastos represents the argument thus:
If a number of things, a, b, c are all F, there must be a single, Form F-ness, in virtue of which we apprehend a,b,c, as all F.
If a,b,c and F-ness are all F, there must be another form, F-ness1, in virtue of which we apprehend a,b,c, and F-ness as all F.
This seems to lead to an infinite regress. Vlastos claims, however, that the logic is flawed, in that the regress occurs because of the replacement of F-ness by F-ness1. Vlastos proposed potential fixes to this argument using “self-predication”, but this need not concern us here. I actually think that Vlastos’s problem is manufactured by him, and not by Plato’s words. But a discussion of this would take us too far afield. The point that I want to emphasize here is that whether or not the TMA scuttles the TOI, or at least the “participation” version of it, Plato does not seem to have felt that it did so, since in the course of the discussion he has Parmenides say, “you are trying to define prematurely . . . each one of the Forms, before you are properly trained” and “Only an ingenious man will be able to understand that for each thing there is some Kind, a being itself by itself, but only someone even more remarkable will be able to discover it and teach it to another who has already thoroughly examined all these difficulties” (135 b, translation by Arnold Hermann and Sylvanna Chrysakopoulou). These words seem to recognize the problem posed by the “greatest difficulty” but imply that some smart thinking will overcome it. Considering that this “greatest difficulty” is here dropped and not taken up again in Plato’s work (as far as we know) I see this in another light, as a leap of faith, when reason has failed.
I think that the “greatest difficulty” hits the nail squarely on the head: “There are many difficulties as well, Parmenides said, but the greatest one is this: if someone were to say that the Forms – such as we claim they must be – are not even fit to be known, one would be unable to prove him wrong, unless the disputer happened to be widely experienced and not unintelligent, and also willing to follow the proof through numerous remote arguments. Otherwise, the person who requires that they be unknowable would remain unconvinced.” (133 b) I, for example, remain unconvinced 2,500 years later.
What Ross says about this is mostly measured and sane. He says that of the discussion in the first part, “It does not express doubt about the theory itself, but does express doubt about Plato’s earlier formulation of the theory” and concludes that “What he (Parmenides) says of the Theory of Ideas is that it is fundamentally true, but that it has been proclaimed without that regard to precision of thought which only a training in dialectic can give. The object of the ‘second part’ of the dialogue is to furnish an example of that training.”
I won’t go on to discuss the eight theses of the second part of the dialogue except to say that, by its unfolding of contradictory results from the assumptions that either a One exists or that a One does not exist, it reminds me mostly of the chess match played by our hero against Mr. Endon in Samuel Beckett’s hilarious novel, Murphy. Murphy, as part of his job at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (MMM) is required to visit each patient’s room every twenty minutes during the night to ensure that the patient had not “cut his throat” during the interim. So every twenty minutes Murphy enters Mr. Endon’s room, switches on the light, and makes a move on the chessboard arrayed in front of Mr. Endon on his bed. Mr. Endon has played his piece during the interim. Mr. Endon’s game (“Endon’s Affence”) consists in arraying his pieces fan-like onto the board and then withdrawing them as nearly as possible to their initial positions until the 43rd move, after which “White (Murphy) surrenders.”
In his discussion of the Theaetetus Ross suggests that since in the Parmenides Plato claims that, without the TOI, discourse would be impossible; in the Theaetetus, which Ross reckons was written not long after the first part of the Parmenides, Plato leaves the TOI and turns to developing a theory of knowledge, upon which to build the TOI. That the Theaetetus ends in aporia is for me a telling indicator of the shakiness of the TOI itself.
The Sophistes and the Politicus
The Sophistes is the first dialogue in which Socrates plays a minor role. The chief spokesman in the dialogue is instead an “Eleatic stranger” visiting Athens from parts influenced by the famous Eleatics, Parmenides and Zeno. But this Eleatic is a critical thinker who is not a thoroughgoing monist like Zeno. The dialogue starts out referencing “yesterday’s discussion” in the Theaetetus dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus. The discussion proceeds from the introductory question about the definition of the Philosopher, Statesman, and Sophist into a two-sided discussion between the young Theaetetus and the Eleatic stranger in which the argument really revolves around the old Parmenidian question of how “not-being” can exist. The opponents in this consideration of “not-being” are the materialists, who say that only that which is tangible is real, and the “Friends of the Forms.” Ross discusses four possibilities as to whom Plato is referring as the “Friends of the Forms”:
Megarians
Italian Pythagoreans
Platonists who had reverted to Pythagorean and Eleatic elements
Plato himself in an earlier phase.
Ross opts for option 4.
He translates a long passage (248 C4 – 249 b 12) to the effect that that change, life, soul, and understanding have a place in that which is perfectly real; that both change and unchanging things (the Ideas) have reality. This is not to be understood as a great departure from the supposedly monist theory of Parmenides. In fact it is recognition of both of the two “worlds” in Parmenides’s poem. The stranger then takes the discussion to the “greatest of the kinds of forms”: Being, Sameness, Difference, Motion, and Rest. The conclusion here is that, “while no Form can be ‘mixed’ with another in the sense of being identified with it, there are three Forms – Being, Sameness, and Difference – that can be predicated of all Forms, certain pairs of Forms of which one can be predicted of the other, and other pairs of Forms of which neither can be predicated of the other.” The science which discovers how Forms blend and apply to one another is the science of dialectic, philosophy.
The stranger then brings the discussion then to a truly anti-Parmenidian conclusion: that “not-being” exists, as opposed to what Parmenides has said, and that “When we speak of not-being, we speak, I think, not of something that is the opposite of being, but only of something different (257 B).” The conclusions about not-being suggest the importance of context in determining what a Form is “different from.” He begins with the proposition that all discourse depends on the weaving together of Forms by the speaker or thinker. For example, consider the statement “Theaetetus flies”. Theaetetus flying does not exist, but Theaetetus exists and flying exists, so in asserting Theaetetus flies “we are not asserting of him something that does not exist, but simply something that does not belong to him, something ‘other’, i.e. other than all the things that do belong to him.”
Ross concludes his discussion of the Sophistes with an appreciation of the “communion of the classes . . . the discovery of certain very obvious relations between five terms.” He says, “ . . . what is important is the establishment of the principle that the Forms are neither a collection of entities standing in no positive relations to each other, nor yet are capable of entering into all storms of relations to one another – that they form, indeed, a system.” This is suggestive of Wittgenstein’s “games form a family” from the Philosophical Investigations; ironical, because I think Wittgenstein’s constructivism represents a true alternative to the TOI.
For the rest of this review, see my blog: http://notesfrommylibrary.wordpress.c....
August 17, 2025
فوق العاده دقیق، عمیق و چگاله. بهترین کتاب برای شناخت افلاطون است.
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February 19, 2026Indispensable para el estudio del corpus platónico. Nada más para decir.
January 19, 2012
I read this for a survey course on Plato taught at Loyola University Chicago during the 1980/81 academic year. As it turned out the class focused on the same themes treated in this book. However, having read so much about Plato during this semester, this particular book is not outstanding in memory.
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