I want to suggest that Plato arrived at a revised theory of forms in the later dialogues. Or perhaps I might rather say that he constructed a new underpinning for the theory. This can be discerned, I believe, in the Sophist, taken together with certain parts of the dialectic of the Parmenides which use the same language as the Sophist.

Some statements couched in the present tense have no reference to time. They are, if you like, grammatically tensed but logically tenseless. Mathematical statements such as ‘twice two is four’ or ‘there is a prime number between 125 and 128’ are of this sort. So is the statement I have just made. To ask in good faith whether there is still the prime number there used to be between 125 and 128 would be to show that one did not understand (...) the use of such statements, and so would any attempt to answer the question. It is tempting to take another step and talk of such timeless statements as statements about timeless entities. If the number 4 neither continues nor ceases to be twice two this is, surely, because the number 4 has no history of any kind, not even the being a day older today than yesterday. Other timeless statements might shake our confidence in this inference: ‘clocks are devices for measuring time’ is a timeless statement, but it is not about a class of timeless clocks. But, given a preoccupation with a favoured set of examples and a stage of thought at which men did not distinguish the properties of statements from the properties of the things they are about, we can expect timeless entities to appear as the natural proxies of timeless statements. (shrink)

What is the relation between a whole and its parts? The metaphysics of structure and composition is much discussed in modern philosophy; now Verity Harte provides the first sustained examination of Plato's rich but neglected discussion of the topic, and shows how it can illuminate current debates. This book is an invaluable resource both for scholars of Plato and for modern metaphysicians.

Der Dialog Philebos geh¿rt zu den als schwierig angesehenen Sp¿erken Platons und wird daher von einer breiteren ¿fentlichkeit kaum wahrgenommen. Seine lebhafte Form, mit Sokrates als Gespr¿sf¿hrer, wie auch sein Thema, der Wettstreit zwischen Lust und Wissen um den Rang als h¿chstes Gut, sollte ihn jedoch auch Nichtfachleuten empfehlen, denn der Dialog endet mit einem f¿r Platon unerwartet gro¿¿gigen Kompromi¿ sowohl das Wissen als auch gewisse Formen der Lust sind unverzichtbare Bestandteile des guten Lebens. Der Weg zu diesem Ergebnis ist (...) langwierig, aber lohnend: er verbindet eine Einf¿hrung in die dialektische Methode mit aufschlu¿eichen Erkl¿ngen zum mathematisch- harmonischen Weltbild des sp¿n Platon. Die Bearbeiterin Prof. Dr. Dorothea Frede ist Gesch¿sf¿hrende Direktorin am Philosophischen Seminar der Universit¿Hamburg. (shrink)

There are three main views of the development of Plato’s distinction between being and becoming which have been defended in recent times. Most scholars have thought that Plato always held the same version of the distinction despite appearances to the contrary. But some who have taken this position have thought that Plato took the realm of being to consist of things which never change in any way, and the realm of becoming to consist of things which are never stable in (...) any way. Others have thought that Plato’s account of things in the realm of becoming was not so extreme. They have maintained that the realm of being is made up of things which never change in any way, but that the realm of becoming consists of things which constantly change while they exist in many ways. The third view belongs to those who have held that Plato did in his middle dialogues take the extreme view of becoming and the extreme version of the distinction which that entails. But later, they claim, he discovered that the distinction was incoherent. He therefore abandoned it, and the metaphysical doctrine of degrees of reality which he had based on it, altogether. (shrink)