Abstract

This study aims to provide a historically accurate assessment of Plato's crucial engagement with Parmenides. It proceeds by establishing the recoverable features of Plato's middle and later period reception and developing interpretations of the relevant portions of Parmenides' poem in accordance with the parameters determined by this reception, only at which point is it possible to assess Parmenides' influence on Plato. Part I surveys certain Parmenidean elements in Plato's middle period eschatology and epistemology before focusing on the relation between Parmenides B2, B3, B6, B8.34-36 and the argument at Republic 5.467e4-477b11 and developing readings that support Aristotle's attribution to each thinker of an "argument from the possibility of knowledge" . Next I demonstrate the close relation between Plato's description of the sight-lovers and Parmenides' criticisms of mortals, discussing along the way Antisthenes, Hippias, and Gorgias as thinkers whom Plato would class as sight-lovers for refusing the key assumptions of his version of APK. Part I concludes with an interpretation of Parmenides' conception of doxa and its objects in accordance with the Platonic appropriation. Part II considers Plato's later view of Parmenides, particularly in the Sophist, in light of the results of Part I. I begin by discussing the representation of the Parmenidean thesis in the Theaetetus and the opening exchanges of the Parmenides. I then show how the Sophist brings Plato's own understanding of Parmenides into direct conflict with several recognizably sophistic appropriations, from which Plato is concerned to recover the Parmenidean legacy. Consideration of the doxography of views on the number of onta at 242cff. suggests that the association of Parmenides with Xenophanes is one key to Plato's later view of Parmenides. This suggestion finds confirmation in the Parmenidean/Xenophanean description of the world soul in the Timaeus. I thus attempt to reconstruct the view of Xenophanes' God in the fourth century before proceeding to develop an interpretation of Parmenides in accordance with the later Platonic reception. The result is a reading according to which Parmenides' principal thesis is that the universe is One qua Being