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A Question on Parmenides and Plato's Forms
Difficulties of Parmenides' account of knowledge and how Plato's Forms solve it

A Question on Parmenides and Plato's Forms

iron_ike
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Posted 11/02/09 - 12:41 PM: Subject: ? on Parmenides and plato's forms	#1
I am having a hard time picking out the difficulties in Parmenides account of knowledge. He says that we can only have knowledge of "the one" and "the one" is knowledge of everything. He goes to say that what exists will always exist and nothing can come into being. Another point he makes is that we can not talk about what is not because it is absurd. This is just a brief outline of what I think are the main points of his argument. What I don't understand are the difficulties of this argument in giving his account of knowledge, and how Plato's forms can help to overcome these difficulties. Any advice would be helpful.

Wolfman
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Posted 11/02/09 - 01:30 PM:	#2
iron_ike wrote: This is just a brief outline of what I think are the main points of his argument. What I don't understand are the difficulties of this argument in giving his account of knowledge, and how Plato's forms can help to overcome these difficulties. This might help: Parmenides supposes that the act of talking and thinking about something is parasitic, or dependent upon there being a something for us to talk and think about. If we add to this Parmenides's further claim that anything that exists can be thought or spoken of, it follows that that which can be thought and spoken of and that which exists are the same. But… You might well question Parmenides's claim that we can only speak of or think about that which exists. What about elves, unicorns, Santa Claus and Pegasus? We can speak and think about them, can't we? Yet they don’t exist. So Parmenides's central claim seems just wrong, doesn't it? Still, even if we don't agree with Parmenides, we can at least concede that it is, at first sight, puzzling how we are able to speak or think of something if it's not there for us to think or speak about. Even today, many philosophers acknowledge that the significance of thought and talk about at least some entities is 'object-dependent'. At any rate, it looks like Parmenides might have some explaining to do as far as the nature of reality is concerned.
"That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil" - Nietzsche "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." - Aristotle "It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins." - Lao Tzu "Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play." - Kant

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Posted 11/03/09 - 02:24 AM:	#3
Well, for one thing there are probably as many Parmenides (I think that would be the correct greek plural) as there are interpreters of Parmenides. And how one views his account of knowledge depends on whether one views him as an extreme monist, dual-aspect theorist, predicational monst and so on. So, it's really a complex question. But as for his relation to Plato, I would say Plato adopted a dual-aspect or rather two-realm view of Parmenides (such a view was common in antiquity): there is the rationally knowable, unchanging One, and the phenomenal world, forever changing and knowable only by way of belief. On such an interpretation, what Plato would have found problematic is that Parmenides's One can't account for what we can rationally know. His way out was to replace the One with a plurality of Forms. Later, in the Sophist and Statesman, he would also find Parmenides's insistence that one can't talk about something that is not problematic. Now, this is at best a plausible reconstruction, at worst baseless speculation. The Eleans are mentioned only in Plato's later dialogues, where he has modified the theory of Forms he is best known for quite a bit. But given that the dual-aspect interpretation was common in Plato's time, that it is similar to his own view of the phenomenal view and the theory of Forms, and that the early dialogues make clear that Plato holds we can know a lot of things rationally while Parmenides mentions (at least in the DAI) just one, I would say that it at least makes some sense. And as for Parmenides himself, I would say the radical monistic interpretation is too bizarre to have actually been held by someone (well, maybe Melissus). And, if we're to make sense of his Way of Belief, I would say that the predicational monist or dual aspect interpretations are the most helpful.

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