Lesley Brown’s chapter ‘Do Forms Play the Role of Concepts in Late Plato?’ starts by noting a major issue of controversy concerning the Forms in the Middle Dialogues, namely whether Forms are explanatory properties whose role is to account for why things are the way they are and are therefore the objects of philosophical inquiry and knowledge, or whether Forms are concepts whose role is to explain everyday thinking and discourse. On the assumption that the former option best captures the role of Forms in Plato’s so-called Middle Dialogues, Brown addresses the question whether Plato’s later dialogues manifest a shift in emphasis such that the latter interpretation gains greater prominence. In her view, even though Plato’s later dialogues show increasing interest in matters of language and meaning, and hence may perhaps be taken to show a somewhat greater interest in the role Forms or Kinds play in our everyday thinking and discourse, nonetheless the prominence of the method of division in these works underscores that the Forms are primarily properties discoverable by philosophical inquiry, not everyday concepts or meanings.

Engaging directly with the question whether Platonic Forms are concepts, David Sedley’s chapter ’Are Platonic Forms Concepts?’ takes its start from the Parmenides 132b–c, where Socrates and Parmenides briefly examine the hypothesis that Forms are ‘thoughts’ (noēmata). Sedley asks what ‘thoughts’ are in that context, and argues that they are not thought contents, but acts of thinking. The chapter offers an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the classical theory of Forms as showcased in the Phaedo, Republic, Parmenides, and Timaeus, in terms that clarify why Plato was bound to reject the hypothesis considered in the Parmenides (132b–c), namely that Forms are thoughts.

This chapter turns to Herodotus’ unique narratorial reticence in making firm truth claims. "What is said" and "what seems" are found with much greater frequency than "what is true." Juxtaposing the Histories with contemporary discussions on epistemology will demonstrate the extent to which truth was problematized as a standard of inquiry in the fifth century. The narrator’s response to this is to use truth as an elusive criterion in order to highlight the difficulty of meeting its conditions. The final portion of this chapter looks to the frequency of "veridical" εἰμί in the Histories and points to its status as a criterion of accuracy in Presocratic epistemology. It argues for its incorporation in historical narrative as a distinctive marker of epistemic certainty.

Chapter 6 explores the interconnection between natural philosophy and liberation from rebirth, arguing first that knowledge of the world is necessary to change one’s being from mortal to divine nature and, second, that purifications play a central role in knowledge acquisition. After a consideration of epistemic reflections at Empedocles’ time and the role of initiation in attaining true knowledge, it is shown that Empedocles explains the change of being into divine nature at the level of the elements. Indeed, in processes of perception and knowledge acquisition, elements coming from external effluvia interact with elements in the body and thereby modify the mind’s mixture. It follows that the revelation of Empedocles’ philosophy can change our mind to the point that it will become a divine mind. The possibility of becoming divine through knowledge of the world goes along with the training one must undergo to be adequately prepared to receive it. This training coincides with processes of purification, and Empedocles explains from a physiological standpoint how these enable the structure of the elements of our mind to be enhanced to the point where it becomes attuned to the divine.

Aiming at reconstructing the prologue to On Nature, the first part of this chapter focuses on the collocation of the demonological fragments which, by expanding on Empedocles’ exile introduced in B 115, depict his katabasis into the realm of the dead. The narrative of this extraordinary journey serves Empedocles as authorial legitimation on matters beyond ordinary human knowledge. The second part of Chapter 2 reconstructs the rest of the proem by interweaving traditionally introductory themes, such as the dedication to Pausanias and the invocation to the Muse, with novel topics concerning the rejection of ritual sacrifice based on Empedocles’ concept of rebirth. The proem thus reconstructed presents a coherent programmatic structure and makes sense of several Empedoclean fragments that are essential for a comprehensive and impartial understanding of his thought. Moreover, by showing that religious concerns inform the entire introductory section, the new proem indicates that the concept of rebirth is central to Empedocles’ physical system and thus offers a new basis to rethink the interplay of myth, religion, and physics in his natural philosophy.

Sophists were active participants in ancient discussions about being or what-is at the most general level. This chapter discusses the contributions of Gorgias, Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron in the context of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. All of these figures share a serious commitment to ontological inquiry as well as a concern with the problems that arise when discussing being or what-is. They also share an approach to these problems that is at times paradoxical and self-undermining. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Parmenides’ poem, a work that serves as an important backdrop for later ontology. It then covers Gorgias’ On Not-Being, a response to the Eleatics and a unique contribution in its own right. Gorgias’ work is then compared with that of Zeno and Melissus. Finally, the more limited evidence we have of Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron’s ontological theorizing is discussed.

This volume offers perspectives on examples of key ingredients in Plato’s writing: particularly of argument, allegory, images, and myth, of intertextuality, and of paradox, but also his characterization of speakers he portrays in dialogue, now through narration, now direct dramatic presentation, and his assumed readerships. All the essays included were prompted by perception of something problematic: either in a passage within a dialogue itself, or in the way scholarship had tackled or failed to tackle a topic. First come three approaching the corpus as a whole, three different vantage points. The next group of three focus on arguments and disputants within the overall argumentative structure of three very different dialogues: Gorgias, Cratylus, and Parmenides. A third group contains two studies of celebrated imaginative fictions – the Noble Lie and the Cave – that perform key but unstraightforward roles in the philosophical strategy of the Republic. The final six chapters discuss the Laws. They explore further literary and philosophical dimensions of Plato’s writing in the last and longest of his dialogues, nowadays yielding up more philosophical rewards than was once the case.

The second version in the text of Part I of the Parmenides of the Third Man regress against the theory of Forms has often been read in its critical thrust as essentially identical with the original version. That interpretation fails to do sufficient justice to the regress’s focus specifically on the Form of Likeness. Such a Form has to be posited once the application of the predicate like inherent in the original–copy model of participation in Forms is itself explained on that model. Are Platonists then trapped? Part II of the dialogue supplies indications to the contrary. Like figures in many of its arguments, where it is often construed as being qualified in the same way. What readers effectively come to recognise is that like is a second-order predicate: ‘is like’ means ‘share the same first-order predicate’, not ‘participates in the Form Likeness’. Part II of the Parmenides therefore supplies materials for resisting the regress; and the presentation of likeness as a theme which we are invited to pursue through both parts alerts us to the fact that they are available, and are pertinent to the business of evaluating Parmenides’ critique of Socrates.

Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

This introduction has three goals: to locate this book’s arguments in contemporary scholarship on Parmenides, to outline its methodology and structure, and to establish the stakes of the project as a whole. The first considers Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration – the central topic of this book – as a relic of the ‘Greek Miracle’ paradigm; it also addresses discussions of Parmenides’ use of poetry and his relationship to Homer. The second addresses distinctions between actors’ and observers’ categories and between reasoning and discourse, and explores the Foucauldian discourse analysis that anchors the book’s treatment of the relationship between Parmenides and Homer. The third requires setting out what this book does not intend to do in order to specify its main contribution: providing an account of how Parmenides’ use of the image of the hodos helps him invent extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration. The Introduction sketches out the three axes of the book’s argument: an exploration of the physical reality of archaic and classical Greek roads, a discussion of the semantics of the word hodos, and an articulation of the relationship between Parmenides’ and Homer’s poems.

The previous chapter locates Parmenides in his physical and linguistic contexts; this chapter locates him in his poetic, intellectual, and cultural milieux. It argues that we need to understand Parmenides’ poem in light of the late archaic revolution in the way that Homer was conceptualized. This chapter examines the epistemological framework Parmenides inherits from Hesiod and Xenophanes in considering the nature of human enquiry; the way that other poets in the late archaic period make use of the newly emergent figure of Homer and the corpus of Homeric poetry, especially with respect to their claims to knowledge and their relationship to the Muses; and the ways that scholars have characterized developments between Homeric poetry and the poetry of the late archaic period. I show how Parmenides uses the resources this Homeric tradition offers to launch a multipronged response to the challenges set down by Hesiod and Xenophanes. These include: reinitiating contact with a Muse-like figure in the proem; the use of crossroads imagery to articulate fundamental distinctions; ceding the voice of the poem to the unnamed goddess; the use of argument; and the return to the privileged poetic form of epic dactylic hexameter.

This chapter pivots to Parmenides’ poem by examining at a more general level the close intertextual connections with Odyssey 12. I then examine in close detail how the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in Parmenides’ Fragment 2 bears a close resemblance to the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12; I also detail important differences between Parmenides’ and Homer’s uses of this disjunction. Finally, I explore the importance of this disjunction for Parmenides’ groundbreaking extended deductive argument and, especially, its role in the practice of demonstration.

This appendix addresses Parmenides’ Fragment 5, which has sometimes been taken as a challenge to the linear, hodos-like structure of Parmenides’ argument. I establish the matrix of possible readings this fragment allows and show how this framework can organize different interpretations of it offered by previous scholars. Finally, I make clear that none of these readings of Fragment 5 undermines the argument made in the course of this book.

This chapter is in many ways the culmination of the book. It applies the analysis of chapters 3 and 4 to the structure of Parmenides’ Fragment 8, and shows how Parmenides uses the blueprint of Circe’s hodos in Odyssey 12 to craft what we would call an extended deductive argument; in this, it develops the discussion of Chapter 5. It cashes out the implications of Chapter 1 by showing how Parmenides takes advantage of rut road imagery to articulate what we would call a notion of logical necessity, and by showing how the durative and telic components of the word hodos define the teleological shape of his arguments. Building on Chapter 2, I set out the traditions Parmenides developed by creating a discursive structure that is both systematic and argumentatively rigorous. I also examine how the poem’s complex relationships between story, plot, and the time of narration plays a crucial role in bestowing on Parmenides’ arguments, and on demonstration more generally, an ostensibly timeless quality. Finally, I assess my conclusions about Parmenides’ invention of deductive argumentation in relation to other scholars’ discussions of his arguments, and clarify what my argument does not claim to offer – and what it insists on.

This chapter investigates the critique of anthropomorphism that we find in Xenophanes of Colophon and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Hesiod’s Theogony is assumed as background and as paradigm for the tendency to treat either the world’s components or gods generally as humanlike. With Xenophanes of Colophon we have the first and one of the fiercest attacks on such a kind of anthropomorphism, inasmuch as Xenophanes not only challenges anthropomorphism in traditional religion and myth but also intimates that at the root of religious beliefs and practices, among his fellow Greeks as well as among foreigners, is a motive of philautia, of self-love. Another strong early critique of anthropomorphism is found in Heraclitus of Ephesus, who curtly dismisses the idea of world-making by a god and stridently attacks certain traditional forms of religious worship. And yet neither thinker can avoid sliding into a particular kind of anthropomorphism, namely into what Mourelatos calls ‘epistemic anthropo-philautia’ – philautia understood not as the ‘self-love’ or ‘vanity’ an individual may show, but rather as the species-philautia we indulge in when we project upon the cosmos structures and forms that cognitively afford special intuitive appeal to us human beings.

The arguments put forth by Parmenides’ goddess have some marked implications for language: mortal terms are deceptive and what truly ‘is’ seems hard to capture in ordinary language. This chapter argues that Parmenides uses poetry in a variety of ways to bypass these difficulties. Verse could be a notoriously deceptive form of discourse in causing its recipients to forget their immediate surroundings and enter into an imagined and potentially illusory mimetic world. In the Doxa section of the poem, Parmenides highlights this quality of his verse to illustrate the wider deceptiveness of mortal sensory experience. On the other hand, the transportive qualities of verse render it a means by which to provide a taster of the ineffable and sublime emotional-cum-cognitive experience of contemplating that which truly is. Moreover, through alluding to meta-literary episodes such as Hesiod’s Theogony proem and the Sirens episode of the Odyssey, Parmenides engages in an ongoing discussion concerning the nature and function of song. His contribution can be regarded as an important moment in the emergence of the Classical conception of poetry: in presenting the Doxa as a poetic world deriving from mortal opinion, Parmenides comes close to Platonic conceptions of literary mimesis.

The Introduction sets out the aims and methods of the book. It outlines how the literary-critical approach adopted differs from the predominately philosophical interests of existing scholarship on these texts. A key distinction is the focus on the emotional experiences of audiences rather than narrowly defined argumentative content. The treatment of Archaic verse as literature is defended against the charge of anachronism: some have argued that early Greek verse differs essentially from later literature in that it was valued primarily for its purported truthfulness, but the ‘truth’ of Archaic Greek poetry seems to go far beyond mere factual accuracy, encompassing symbolic and emotional truths that are also hallmarks of later conceptions of the literary. Furthermore, the modern perspectival theory of literary truth espoused by many theorists articulates a concept that is already implicit in the emphasis on the visual quality of verse found in Homer and ancient criticism. It will be argued that Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles use verse in conformity with a poetics of truth in this expanded sense. Finally, this chapter explains how the book will use the surviving fragments of these authors as a source for ideas about the nature and function of poetry.