It is arguable that the student of the deductions which make up the second part of Plato's Parmenides is today better placed than any of his predecessors, save Aristotle, Speusippus, and other immediate associates of Plato, to understand and evaluate those forbidding pages. Ways of looking at and handling the matter of the text are available to him which were not open to those who lived before the rise of critical philological scholarship in Europe in the last century, and of (...) analytical philosophy in the English-speaking world in this. He has to hand, too, some pioneering work on the dialogue of recent date. (shrink)