Journal of the History of Philosophy

Book Reviews Constance C. Meinwald. Plato's "Parmenides." New York: Oxford University Press, a991. Pp. 19~. Cloth, $3z.5o. Constance Meinwald's book on the Parmenides appears toward the end of a decade of intensive study by other scholars of that forbidding--and profound--dialogue. Perhaps unavoidably then, her work will be read in tandem with this recent scholarship. In this context, her study is remarkably ambitious, but (for this reader) it is also far from persuasive. Meinwald's thesis is that the Parmenides develops "a distinction between two finds of predication" (~6; italics in text)--predication pros ta alia ("in relation to the others") and predication pros heauto ("in relation to itself"). The former is predication that concerns a "subject's display of some feature comformably to something other--namely, the nature associated with that feature" (74)- The latter "signals that the predication reveals the structure of the subject's own nature" (74). Thus, the Parmenides is neither an extended exercise just for its own sake nor purely aporetic--it is substantive Platonic metaphysics. The concluding chapters of Meinwald's study, including a brief resolution of the Third Man issue (a 55-57), will be found useful only if the reader accepts this interpretive structure. As a result, this review will concentrate on that structure. In the Introduction , Meinwald distinguishes two types of Parmenides interpretation. The first, "rejectionism ," assumes that the contradictions in the dialectical exercise portion of the dialogue "are real," an assumption that "produces a need to find things to reject" (so). She then presents five reasons against rejectionism (21-23) and adopts the second type of interpretive approach, i.e., that the contradictions are only apparent. After the relatively brief Chapter 2 on the "dialectical scheme," Chapter 3, the longest chapter (3~ pages) in the book follows, devoted to the "in-relation-to qualification." For Meinwald, "we might think" that "Plato's purpose in describing the exercise in terms that stress these mysterious qualifications so laboriously is actually to draw our attention to the importance of working out the distinction they indeed mark" (46). It may be observed that even if all five of her reasons against rejectionism turn out to be sound (and their cogency varies), it does not follow that "rejectionism" entails looking for something in the dialectical exercises to reject. If the dialogue is aporetic (as R. E. Allen contends), then the question becomes one of determining the metaphysical assumptions and ramifications for each of the arguments Parmenides advances. In this case, then, what to reject depends on determining what has been assumed and what follows from these assumptions. [4551 456 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3i:3 JULY a99 3 This approach exhibits Meinwald's disproportionate emphasis on relations in formulating her substantive interpretation of the dialogue. In fact, this weakness emerges already in Chapter 3- In one of her principal arguments for emphasizing the relational element of the exercises, Meinwald points out that both summaries of Parmenides' arguments (at a6ob2- 3 and 166c2-5) "employ the in-relation-to qualifications" (49). True enough, but this textual fact is not sufficient to conclude, as Meinwald does, that the wholepoint of the dialectical exercises is to decipher and reveal a theory of relations. At least as relevant would be the metaphysical character of what is being related to what, not just the relations joining the various entities to one another. Meinwald does not, however, discuss relations in a metaphysical vacuum. In her analysis of predication pros ta alla, she asserts that "the qualities (Justice, Unlikeness, and so on) are playing the roles Plato and others in antiquity assign to natures (ous/ai, phuseis)." Thus, for predication pros ta alia, "the nature will be that in light of which we will understand or explain (some of) our observations about the individual, if we do achieve any understanding of them" (62). And for predication pros heauto, Meinwald "will go on the assumption that each form is specially associated with a nature" (63). Obviously then the notion of nature is crucial for Meinwald's reading, for she asserts that predication pros heauto "is grounded in relations between natures" (67). Furthermore, the content of these natures...