The entire Platonic corpus is a setting forth, variously, of the theory of ideas as an answer to the problem of significant speech: how is it possible to assign stable definitions and names to unstable sensible phenomena? As an answer, the theory is anything but neat and tidy because it raises more question. The Parmenides is explicitly about the ideas and thus most appropriately in its speeches as well as its dialogic deeds it raises more questions than it answers. Its (...) proven ability to do so is manifested in the inability of any interpretation to put the dialogue's two halves together into a neat seamless whole. It is the thesis of the dissertation that this difficulty is intentional and inseparable from Plato's presentation of the ideas. Examining what makes it impossible to put the halves together will also reveal the possibility of a connection, and so the dissertation pays close attention to Socrates' speech setting forth his theory of the ideas and Parmenides' demonstration of the dialectical exercise. (shrink)

The past ten years have seen an upsurge of interest in Plato's Parmenides among those who study philosophy, and all agree that it is Plato's most riddling dialogue. Chief among the reasons for this enigmatic quality is the exercise which Parmenides calls the "laborious game". And the sorry truth of the matter is that most of the commentaries on the dialogue, some ancient but more modern, are incredibly wearying to read, more than the dialogue itself. As if aware of this, (...) commentators themselves use words like "tedious," "disagreeable," "singularly unappealing" to characterise the game, and simultaneously to apologize for what is to come: much more of the same in their interpretations. But lest there be any misunderstanding, the charge against most modern commentators is not that they make the student of the dialogue work, but simply that they have failed to keep together the two aspects of Parmenides' "game that looks like work", that is to say, the playful and the serious. They have made the game too much like work. (shrink)