Plato's Late Ontology

M. Sayre Kenneth

Description

Prior to the publication of Plato's Later Ontology in 1983, there was general agreement among Plato scholars that the theses attributed to Plato in Book A of Aristotle's Metaphysics can not be found in the dialogues. Plato's Late Ontology presented a textually based argument that in fact these theses appear both in the Philebus and in the second part of the Parmenides. The pivotal point of the argument is a number of synonyms for the expressions used by Aristotle in reporting Plato's views, found in the Greek commentators on Aristotle writing during the 3rd to the 5th Century A.D. These synonyms are also used by Plato himself in discussing the theses in question. The present book is a reprint of Plato's Late Ontology along with a recent article showing that a subset of these theses can also be found in the section of measurement appearing in the middle of the Statesman. The argument to this effect is an extension of that in Plato's Late Ontology, but is supported by a much expanded list of synonyms from the Greek Commentators. The appearance of the theses in question in the Statesman augments the original argument for their presence in the Parmenides and the Philebus.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Parmenides Publishing
• Date de parution: 12 janvier 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781930972506
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

PLATO S LATE ONTOLOGY
PLATO S LATE ONTOLOGY
- A RIDDLE RESOLVED -


With a new Introduction and the Essay
EXCESS AND DEFICIENCY AT STATESMAN 283C-285C
Kenneth M. Sayre
2005 Parmenides Publishing All rights reserved
Originally published in 1983 by Princeton University Press
This edition, with a new introduction and the Essay-
Excess and Deficiency at Statesman 283C-285C
-published in 2005 by Parmenides Publishing in the United States of America
ISBN-10: 1-930972-09-1 ISBN-13: 978-1-930972-09-4
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sayre, Kenneth M., 1928- Plato s late ontology : a riddle resolved : with a new introduction and the essay, Excess and deficiency at Statesman 283C-285C / Kenneth M. Sayre. - New ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-930972-09-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-930972-09-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Plato. 2. Ontology-History. 3. Plato. Statesman. I. Title. B398.O5S29 2005 111.092-dc22 2005025499
EXCESS AND DEFICIENCY AT STATESMAN 283C-285C is an updated version of the essay that originally appeared in the electronic Journal of the International Plato Society . Issue 5. Url: http://www.nd.edu/~plato/plato5issue/Sayre.pdf .
IN MEMORY OF LUCILLE, FOR HER GAIETY, LOVE AND IRREPRESSIBLE HUMANITY
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE: PLATO S BREAK WITH THE MIDDLE PERIOD
1. A Battery of Problems in Parmenides I
2. The Architectonic of Parmenides II
3. Taking Sides in an Ancient Controversy
4. Anticipations of the Indefinite Dyad
CHAPTER TWO: HISTORICAL GLIMPSES AT THE EMERGING THEORY
1. Plato s So-Called Unwritten Teaching
2. Aristotle s Description of Plato s Ontology
3. The Great and (the) Small
4. Looking Ahead to the Philebus
CHAPTER THREE: THE PHILEBUS AND THE GOOD
1. A Gift of the Gods
2. Limit and the Unlimited
3. The Constitution of Forms and Objects
4. Unity as the Good
5. Plato s Final Theory of Forms
APPENDIX A: KNOWLEDGE AND ONTOLOGY IN THE INTERMEDIATE DIALOGUES
Early Developments in the Ontology of Knowledge
Becoming in the Theaetetus
The Ontology of Knowledge in the Sophist
A Story about Participation in the Timaeus
APPENDIX B: ON THE STYLOMETRIC DATING OF THE TIMAEUS AND THE PARMENIDES
APPENDIX C: COMPARISON OF THE PRESENT INTEPRETATION WITH GOSLING S BY GOSLING S CRITERIA
NOTES
EXCESS AND DEFICIENCY AT STATESMAN 283C-285C
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION
When Plato s Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved (henceforth PLO ) first appeared in 1983, it served as a report on research that had begun two decades earlier into the method and metaphysics of Plato s late dialogues. The essay Excess and Deficiency at Statesman 283C-285C, which is republished with PLO in the present volume, can be viewed as an up-dated report on the same project still underway some 20 years later. To explain the relation between the book and the essay, it is best to start with a brief recapitulation of the research project itself. As I recall, the project began to take shape a few years out of graduate school.
My only sustained exposure to Greek thought during graduate studies was in a course with Eric Havelock, several years prior to publication of his Preface to Plato in 1963. The area in which I chose to specialize was epistemology, which brought regular contact with W.V.O. Quine, C.I. Lewis, and (after Lewis retired) Roderick Firth. When I started paying serious attention years later to the Curriculum for the Guardians in the Republic , in which mathematics precedes epistemology (basic dialectic), and epistemology precedes value theory (the study of the Good), I often recalled that Lewis s career followed the same trajectory ( A Survey of Symbolic Logic in 1918, Mind and the World Order in 1929, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation in 1946, and The Ground and Nature of the Right in 1955). Looking back, I suspect that finding Plato s ideal pattern of philosophic development exemplified by Lewis was instrumental in shaping my own career.
Before entering graduate school, I had taken an A.B. in mathematics. When I joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame in the late 1950s, this led to my being assigned a course in the theory of knowledge for majors in the Arts and Letters Mathematics Program. Following the advice of colleagues, I decided to begin the course with a careful reading of Plato s Theaetetus . This was my first serious encounter with a Platonic dialogue.
As the course continued into the 1960s, I became increasingly intrigued by the way the Theaetetus revealed its contents in successive layers. Going through the dialogue again and again began to resemble the process of peeling an onion, with the obvious dissimilarity that there was nothing in the dialogue to assault one s senses. Another lack of resemblance was that, in the case of the dialogue, the process of unfolding never seemed to come to an end. No matter how often I read through it, there were always new riches to be discovered. I have tried to describe the experience of being drawn ever deeper into writing like this in my more recent Plato s Literary Garden: How to Read a Platonic Dialogue (1995).
My class read the Theaetetus in F.M. Cornford s translation. Under the influence of his Plato s Theory of Knowledge (1935), my interest in Plato soon extended to the problems of Being and not-Being and of truth and falsehood in the Sophist. The logical intricacies of Plato s treatment of Being and not-Being in this dialogue soon led to a study of his use of complex logical inference in earlier dialogues as well. My first publication in Plato was Propositional Logic in Plato s Protagoras , which appeared in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic in 1963.
By the mid-1960s, it became apparent that I would have to read the dialogues in their original language to understand the interplay between their logical and their conversational structures. Notre Dame had recently hired a gifted classicist named Robert Vacca, who welcomed me into his intensive course in beginning Greek. This inspiring teacher continued to serve as my mentor in Greek, both in and out of the classroom, until his death in 2004.
Plato s Analytic Method (PAM), my first book-length study of Plato, followed in due course. While primarily a commentary on the Theaetetus and the Sophist , PAM also deals at some length with the mathematics behind the method of hypothesis in the Phaedo and the Republic . I had not yet given much thought to the role of mathematics in the late dialogues. It was only a matter of time, however, before concern for that topic began to move toward center stage.
Here is how it happened. The founder and then director of Notre Dame s Arts and Letters Mathematics program, who had enlisted me to teach his students epistemology, was a mathematician named R. Catesby Taliaferro. Best known professionally for his translations of Ptolemy s Almagest and of The Conics by Apollonius of Perga, Taliaferro had also written a Foreword (1944) to Thomas Taylor s translation of the Timaeus . Of particular interest to this dedicated scholar was the report in Aristoxenus Elements of Harmony of Aristotle s reaction to Plato s enigmatic Lecture on the Good.
According to Aristoxenus, the audience attending Plato s lecture came expecting to learn something about goods that impart human happiness, like wealth and health and bodily strength. What they heard instead was a discourse on mathematics, ending with the claim that the Good is Unity. Parallel accounts of this lecture can be found in Simplicius Commentary on Aristotle s Physics and, according to Simplicius, in Porphyry s (no longer extant) writing on Plato s Philebus. In the same commentary, Simplicius indicates that Aristotle wrote his own report on this event in a work entitled On Philosophy, or alternatively On the Good. Only fragments of this work by Aristotle exist today.
Catesby Taliaferro was not an admirer of Aristotle, whom he perceived as not much of a mathematician and as having little to offer toward understanding the mathematics of Plato s dialogues. As Alexander of Aphrodisias pointed out some 500 years after Aristotle, however, and as Simplicius verified perhaps 300 years after Alexander, the mathematical views associated with Plato in On the Good also found their way into the Metaphysics. These views concerned not only the nature of the Good itself, but also some accompanying doctrines about Forms and numbers, and about how both owe their existence to the Great and the Small and Unity.
While Plato and his followers are mentioned as holding doctrines of this sort at various places in the Metaphysics , the primary locus is section 6 of Book A. The doctrines in question are itemized, with textual references, in PLO , pp. 84-95. In summary form, they state: (1) that numbers come from the participation of the Great and the Small in Unity, (2) that sensible objects are constituted by Forms and the Great and the Small, (3) that Forms are composed of the Great and the Small and Unity, (4) that Forms themselves are numbers, and (5) that the Good is Unity. Another thesis attributed to Plato in Metaphysics A.6., discussed only briefly in PLO , is that the objects of mathematics occupy an intermediate position between Forms and sensible things. It will be noted that all of these doctrines are metaphysical in content, having to do with the nature of things, and that (given thesis (4)) all affirm the mathematical nature of the things involved.
In his foreword to the Timaeus book, Taliaferro referred to these theses as unpublished doctrines of Plato. While obviously they had been published by Aristotle, his point was that they do not appear in Plato s dialogues. The contention that these theses cannot be found in the dialogues gained prominence withi