Take The Dialogues Of Plato, Volume 4: Plato’s Parmenides Chronicled By Plato Released As Hardcover

Parmenides of Plato
By Anonymus

Flower in a crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flowerbut if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.


These are the only enjoyable lines I read in this book,
It is not the edition on the header, but I could not find this one on Goodreads,
It is not really a book, rather pamphlet,
It slipped unnoticed onto my shelves, I like ancient history. Plato may have caught my eye,

However, the first pages are on the subject of philosophy, From the time of Plato, Aristoteles to Berkeley, Locke, Kant and Hegel, Descartes and others, What is philosophy and what is not philosophy,
Is philosophy the explicitness of universal thought
The instrument of thought is thought only we analyse and reconstruct a synthesis out of our analysis, We do nothing more.
Atomic theories cannot be philosophy,
Molecular theories cannot be philosophy,
Evolution is not philosophy,
Physical science is not philosophy, And so on.

The business of philosophy must be Analysis,
The analysis, therefore, is the supreme organon,

Taking analysis as the instrument of thought, Plato in the Parmenides analyses the Univers into the position of explaining everything, and its negation nullifying everything,

This is as far as I could read,
The rest of the book is written in Ancient Greek which I cannot read,

Also, I have come to the limit of my intellectual curiosity and would not enjoy further reading of this Metaphysical subject,

Another reader might be interested,
Its not a good feeling you get when you go to the article on this dialogue at plato, stanford. edu and the author says, “This is his most enigmatic dialogue, ” Much of it, though, is quite interesting and fairly easy to follow, Plato explains his Forms and the standard responses to his view,

Problem: how can the whole Idea, being one, be participated in by man

If something participates in an Idea, does it participate in part of the Idea or the whole The One cannot be a whole, since wholes have parts and the One cant have parts, otherwise it wouldnt be One.
From here Platos interlocutors discuss the metaphysics of the One, which is interesting for Christians on how we gloss Gods simplicity,

The One cant have beginning or end, since those are limits and it is unlimited, Neither can the One have motion, since motion is a coming to be in one place or another, This is the same reason the One cannot change, since change is motion,

The One is also above time, since it cannot participate in time as that would compromise its unicity,

This was a very difficult dialogue, but it is mandatory reading for understanding Platos metaphysics, It also introduces the main problem against Plato: the Third Man Argument,
Extremely important dialogue. In some ways I think Plato is best understood as a response to Parmenides and Heraclitus, However, even having read Parmenides' fragments and listening to some lectures on this dialogue, I still must confess that the second half was much too obscure for me to comprehend well hence I hope to listen to some more lectures and perhaps read some secondary literature on this profoundly impactful thinker.


It was also nice to see Socrates get owned for once, A good, though complex, work by Plato, This more so than any other dialogue demands critical active reading, which is always beneficial when reading Plato, though here it is necessary, This is a difficult dialogue but one of my favorites, Naturally there's no point to debating the contents in a review format like this when the entire design of the work is to commentate on itself and lead to private reflection I suggest reading it carefully and using Mitchell Miller's great secondary, Conversion of the Soul.
What's special here is not only the rare moment where Socrates here, in a flashback, as a very young man is utterly defeated, but also that the metaphysical doctrine espoused by the great Parmenides is one of the least undermined conclusions of any Platonic work that is, at least within the dialogue itself.
The Eleatic trilogy, from my recent perusals, throws a great deal of this into question, Nevertheless, it remains perhaps the main hinge of the entire Platonic corpus, giving in as close to explicit detail as Plato ever would the proper doctrine of the Eide the 'forms' that Socrates holds but does not espouse in so many of the other dialogues, and throwing into question the epistemological statuses of nearly all the other dialogues' conclusions.


Platonic works always come in pairs, and often many pairs the Symposium matches with the Phaedrus but also with the Menexenus, for example, While the parallel metaphysical theory espoused by Socrates in the Republic is the most obvious one, comparing this dialogue to the very funny Euthydemus seems to me very profound: there, Socrates does battle with two athlete brothers, who perform a series of logical acrobatics around a couple of ontological and categorical errors refuted in the Parmenides.
The question posed to the reader of the Euthydemus, then, becomes what to do with these types of midwits, those who can manoeuvre the metaphysical axes at stake but fail to see the proper order.
If Plato's dialogues were meant to facilitate, sometimes conscientiously and sometimes as through a glass darkly, the education and life choices of young intellectuals, then this comic dialogue can only skyrocket in importance once we can appreciate the futility of arguing with such sots, and instead must turn to a question of how to handle them yet, to me, the tacit conclusion there is perhaps one of the most striking and unsettling.
بارمنيدس: ومن ثمة

فإن الجميل في ذاته والخير في ذاته وكل ما نعتبره مثلا في ذاتها يمتنع علينا معرفته.
سقراط: أخشى أن يكون الأمر كذلك.
بارمنيدس: وثمة نتيجة أخرى أخطر من ذلك.
سقراط: ما هي
بارمنيدس: إذا كان ثمة جنس في ذاته للمعرفة فهل يمكن القول بأنه يكون أصوب بكثير من المعرفة التي في عالمنا وكذلك بالمثل يكون الجمال وكل جنس آخر
سقراط: نعم.
بارمنيدس: فإذا كان هناك من يشارك في المعرفة في ذاتها فلابد من أنك تعزو هذا الصواب المطلق للمعرفة إلى الله دون أي كائن آخر
سقراط: حتما.
بارمنيدس: فهل تتيح المعرفة في ذاتها لهذا الإله الحاصل عليها معرفة الأشياء التي في عالمنا
سقراط: ولم لا
بارمنيدس: لأن هناك مبدأ يا سقراط اتفقنا عليه وهو أنه لا المثل في العالم العلوي يتعلق تأثيرها بالأشياء في عالمنا ولا الأشياء في عالمنا يتعلق تأثيرها بالمثل فالتأثير في كل من هذه العالمين ينحصر داخل كل عالم منهما على حدة.
سقراط: لقد اتفقنا بالفعل على ذلك.

بارمنيدس: ألسنا نقول الصدق بتلخيص كل شيء في الآتي: إذا كان الواحد ليس موجودا فلا شيء يوجد إذن نقول ذلك ونقول أيضا سواء أكان الواحد موجودا أم ليس موجودا فإن جميع علاقات الواحد والآخرين فيما يبدو سواء بذاتهم أم في تبادلها ومن جميع وجهات النظر الممكنة هذه العلاقات كلها تكون قائمة ولا تكون ويبدو أنها تكون قائمة ويبدو أنها لا تكون. I think there are three ways to see "The One", The ultimate Good and the source of all reality, our consciousness for when we think, and literally the number '', each are different ways for how we understand the nature of existence being.
We think about being either by our understanding, our experience, our ideas, our contemplation or our lack of contemplation Heidegger, e, g. . Each is equally valid in its on way,

I've recently read Hegel's Phenomenology and that led me to his "Science of Logic" and that led me to this book, Hegel borrows heavily from this book, Hegel puts in his movement dialectic but he mostly insists that we need to understand the painting as the whole before we can understand the pieces of the painting just as Parmenides would say actually as Parmenides does say in this dialog.


It is almost as if this book doesn't belong in the works of Plato's Socratic dialogs, So much really shouts out against what Socrates says elsewhere in Plato's dialogs, The 'forms' from our 'ideas' fall under assault by Parmenides, Opposites don't exist proof by contradiction are used without mercy against much of what Socrates held to be true, Socrates needs the absolute in order to defeat the sophisticated Sophists and therefore needs a starting point in order to get his negation all determinations are negations, but he doesn't have it.
Our being and becoming, the void and matter, motion and stillness, existence and nothing all need an absolute negation and Parmenides takes that away in this incredibly clever dialog.
Kant has to have his intuition categories in order to get the universal, Parmenides gives only "the one",

Heidegger will start with Being dasein, "understanding ones own understanding about ones understanding" and builds a complicated world structure always in threes: past, present, and future and ends in Temporarlity as if he wished to have started with time instead.
What is the proper ontological foundation Being or time Parmenides will put 'The One" outside of time temporally just as the God of an Evangelical will most often be and in my opinion Spinoza does the same but many if not mostreaders of Spinoza seem to disagree.


This is an incredibly important little book which seems to relate to most of the books I've recently have been reading and I wish I had read it before reading some of the others I've recently read Hegel, Heidegger, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Sartre.
It's not a hard to follow book and I actually relistened to parts of it to make sure I was understanding it correctly, .