Abstract

Malcolm argues that all middle-dialogue Platonic Forms are at the same time universals and self-predicating in that they are paradigm cases. This renders them vulnerable to the Third Man argument. Early-dialogue Forms, by contrast, exemplify themselves only when it is legitimate for them to do so, and are therefore exempted from the Third Man. Beauty, for example, may reasonably be supposed to be a beautiful thing "as a general nature", and this exemplification, Malcolm argues, gives no hold to the nonidentity that generates the Third Man. In the middle dialogues, however, Plato is wrong to take Forms as both universals and paradigm cases. The source of this trouble is not the logico-linguistic error of confusing the name of a Form with its description, but Plato's failure to distinguish two types of things that may be called Forms: the universal F and perfectly F things.