Since gregory vlastos resurrected "self-predication" there justifiably has been considerable interest in "self-predication," and the interpretation of this notion is crucial for understanding plato's metaphysics. I am in agreement with vlastos in thinking that plato's degrees-of-reality ontology and his conception of forms as paradigms implies "self-predication." Nevertheless, many of plato's "self-predicational" statements (e.g., "the beautiful is beautiful," "justice is just," etc.) Arise, i believe, from a different source. Plato, at times, accepts an anaxagorean account of causation: a cause must have (...) the quality that it produces in something else. I argue that anaxagorean causation lies behind the apparently "self- predicational" statements at "parmenides" 131 c-e, "euthydemus" 301b, "hippias major" 292e, "protagoras" 330 c,e, and "phaedo" 100c. These statements are, i believe, on a par with an ethical motif of the dialogues– that a man (or the demiurge) must have the quality that he produces in another; e.g., Only a just man can make another man just. (shrink)

It is said that when Socrates is made to ask questions like "What is the pious and what the impious?", "What is courage?", or "What is the beautiful?", he is asking for the definition of a universal. For the "average" Greek of his time, however, this is a radically new question about a radically new sort of object, and Socrates’ interlocutors do not understand it. They usually answer it as if it were a different, if related, question: they tend to (...) provide concrete instances of the universal in question rather than a definition, however inadequate, of the universal itself. Socrates always tries, but does not always succeed, to make himself clear: Meno, for example, is supposed never to get the point. (shrink)