This paper aims to gain multiple perspectives on Plato’s ontology through the analysis of the Intermediates. Plato refers to them to provide his cosmos with a dynamic structure, in which every part relates to a whole. Nevertheless, this definition could reverse in an opposite: the Intermediate justifies the sensible world to reach the ideal stability, concerning a mixture of being and nothing that gets purification from the becoming by degrees. In this interpretation, the sensibility absorbs life from the Forms, living (...) as their parasite. According to J. N. Findlay, the metaxy state is parasitical because of his logical exemplification of the Ideas, lacking an ontological substance. On the contrary, the void of the half-nothing takes a different role, necessary to establish a symbolic betweenness. (shrink)

In the Parmenides Plato claims that by relinquishing Forms one would entirely destroy tên tou dialegesthai dunamin. I argue that this peculiar phrase does not indicate, as often suggested, the power or possibility of all discourse or thought, but the power of dialectic, i. e. the highest science; and that its preservation is, for Plato, a decisive reason for the necessity of the Forms.

Answering articles by Smith (PJ 18) and Matoso (PJ 22) about the Divided Line, I argue that the problems Smith raised and Matoso pretended to solve don’t exist in a proper reading of the analogy and the ensuing allegory of the cave in light of one another and stem from a misunderstanding of the expression ἀνα τὸν αὺτον λόγον at Rep. VI, 509d7: the λόγος to be used to split both segments is not the one used to split the line (...) in the first place, and it is not a numerical ratio, but a logical rationale. (shrink)