Rickless's first chapter draws upon earlier dialogues to present what he dubs "the high theory of forms." This is a comprehensive theory comprising two basic axioms and numerous theorems deduced from them in conjunction with certain auxiliary assumptions about opposites, causation, sensibles, and knowledge (all neatly summarized at pages 44-5 and abbreviated in a list and flow-chart at the end of the preface). The answer to the dialogue's major questions, he optimistically assures us in his Introduction, "is, at bottom, remarkably simple" (5). Samuel Rickless's ambitious study undertakes to do nothing less than furnish a complete logical reconstruction of all the dialogue's arguments and therein to find "the key needed to solve the enduring mystery of the Parmenides" (ix).
There have been deep divisions ever since antiquity over the ultimate point of this dialectical exercise, and its bearing upon the issues raised in the dialogue's first part remains an outstanding problem. Parmenides' demonstration focuses on the One, or the form of unity, and produces a mind-boggling array of rapid and complex deductions making up more than two-thirds of the dialogue. But Parmenides shows Socrates that his hypothesis is susceptible to various difficulties, given his as yet inadequate training, and then demonstrates the method he is to employ whenever positing a form's existence. It opens with Socrates responding to a Zenonian argument by positing separate forms of similarity, plurality, unity, rest, change, and so on, and by claiming that particulars have their attributes in virtue of their participation in these entities. The problems I will be addressing from the scholarship towards the end of the paper consist of the unity of the two halves of the text itself and the bearing of the text on Plato's grand Theory of Forms.The Parmenides remains perhaps the most puzzling Platonic dialogue. I propose in this paper that this new metaphysical presupposition and structure of a sensible thing should replace the traditional One and Many metaphysical presupposition because of its insoluble problem of participation.
In addition, the confluence of Being and Non-Being illuminates a subsidiary conclusion of this text possessing grounds for a new metaphysical presupposition of Being-Non-Being. The main conclusion I have drawn is that the Hypotheses are closing the gulf between Being and Non-Being via the concepts of Sameness, Difference, Becoming, Time and the Instant. I will then use this conclusion to address problems concerning the Parmenides in the Platonic Scholarship.
In this paper I will discuss the Eight Hypotheses in Plato's Parmenides and draw out my own conclusion from them without any external help or secondary literature.
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