This topic was first put on a proper scholarly footing by the late Werner Jaeger and by Charles H. Kahn; earlier scholars tended either to refrain from speculating on the relation to Anaximander of Aristotle's Physics arguments on the infinite, or to deduce the Milesian provenance of one of them simply from its inclusion of a mention of Anaximander's name. It way my original intention in this paper to execute a tidying-up operation after the two well-planned attacks on Anaximander's argument by Jaeger and Kahn. I said some time ago in a footnote that I hoped to strengthen Professor Kahn's case for the unity of the argument concerning the infinite at Physics 203b4-15. If the following remarks achieve anything, it will be the half-fulfilment of that half-promise: instead of strengthening Kahn's reasoning for the unity of Aristotle's argument, what follows will tend to weaken it. But without the materials and the example of Jaeger and Kahn this present operation could never have been mounted, and disagreement with their strategy or tactics indicates no ingratitude and no narrowly polemical intention.

On those occasions on which one gives an interpretation of a work both scanty in remains and obscure in meaning I would take it to be appropriate to insist that one's task is not to argue that one's interpretation is certainly correct but rather to argue that it is probably correct. It is accordingly not my task to argue that it is not possible that other interpretations of Parmenides’ Way of Truth are correct. Nor do I increase the likelihood of my own by decreasing that of theirs.

I seek to give an interpretation which is rich enough to disclose the springs of monism. I am primarily concerned to show how we may understand those arguments which leave us with the conclusion that there is only one thing to know.

The main argument in Parmenides’ didactic poem begins with these remarks by the unnamed goddess who delivers the revelation (B2 in Diels-Kranz Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker):

Introduction

“What reason is there to suppose that those who did know Parmenides’ poem necessarily thought that he had raised a real problem which they must try to deal with? Empedocles, perhaps also Anaxagoras, knew the poem, but they pursue a very different kind of philosophy from Zeno and Melissus: why, then, must we suppose that they are seeking an alternative answer to the problem posed by Parmenides, and that their ultimate material elements are to be seen as modifications of the Eleatic ἓν έόν?“

These rhetorical questions, taken from M. L. West's recent book, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient, make a useful starting point for this inquiry. They are, of course, what the grammar books call “repudiating questions“: the answer hoped for is “no reason“. The argument with which Mr. West goes on to support his negative implication is not likely to convince many students of the Presocratics. He determinedly makes light of Parmenides’ chains of argument, apparently on the ground that “these were not the actual stages of Parmenides’ thinking” — as if Parmenides ought to have been writing his intellectual autobiography instead of a philosophical argument.

As is well enough known, the term physis in Empedocles Fr. 8 (DK) is cited by Aristotle in the Metaphysics (Δ 4,1014b36-1015a3) as meaning the ousia of natural things, in the sense of the stable substance or form that is the terminus of generation (a10-11). This interpretation is rejected almost unanimously by commentators. The three or four attempts to defend it have not proved convincing. The case now seems officially closed. Yet there remain some loose ends. These are of the kind that would keep bothering television detectives and would cause enough loss of sleep to prompt a fresh investigation of a whole case. Is that procedure called for here?

Plato represents Socrates as believing in the unity of the virtues, quarreling with those who, like Protagoras or Meno, wish to treat the virtues as distinct objects of inquiry (Protagoras 329c2ff., Meno 71e1ff.). On the other hand, there is good reason to deny that Plato's Socrates believed in the numerical identity of the virtues (cf. Meno 79a3-5). What Socrates did believe, I shall argue, is that the various virtues are one in essence. I shall show what this means and how it clears up prima facie inconsistencies among Plato's early dialogues.

If I am right, Socrates’ theory has startling consequences. Since essence is exactly what Socrates wants a definition to state, it follows that all virtues will have one and the same definition. And if this is so, no wonder the quest for separate definitions of virtues fails in every case! For example in the Laches the generals are baffled by Courage because Courage has no private essence and cannot be marked off from the other virtues by stating its essence. Its essence is Virtue entire. That is a radical view, but there are good reasons for attributing it to Socrates.

‘The similes of the Sun, Line, and Cave in the Republic remain a reproach to Platonic scholarship because there is no agreement about them, though they are meant to illustrate.’ So wrote A.S. Ferguson in 1934, and so he could write to-day. Four decades have produced at least twenty more substantial contributions to the debate, but no agreement. I shall not attempt to arbitrate between existing interpretations, nor shall I offer an account of the ‘simile of light’ as a whole. I shall confine my attention to a single point: the significance of the shadows in the cave, and of the objects which cast them. The suggestion I shall make seems an obvious one, but I have not found it in the literature. I hope to show at least that it deserves serious consideration.

In this paper there are two claims that I wish to defend. One is that in Socrates’ much discussed “causal” theory concrete particulars are more central than Forms. The other is that these concrete particulars are held by Plato to be not simply bundles of characteristics, not mere meeting-points of Forms, but independent individuals, existing in their own right.

It will not, I believe, be questioned that from one point of view the prime concern of the Phaedo is with concrete particulars; not with Forms, characteristics, or anything else. For, the overriding aim of the dialogue is, surely, to persuade us each to care for his own soul; it is for this reason that arguments are put forward to show that souls are indestructible. But there is no doubt that these souls are particulars.

Phaedo. As I recall. when these points had been granted him, and it was agreed that each of the forms was something, and that the other things, partaking in them. took the name of the forms themselves, he next asked: ‘If you say that that is so, then whenever you say that Simmias is taller than Socrates but shorter than Phaedo, you mean the, don't you, that both things are in Simmias, tallness and shortness?’

If one includes the methodological preface the final argument of the Phaedo is by far the longest, as well as the one Socrates’ audience and Plato's readers are most ready to accept, and is often regarded as the one argument in the Phaedo that Plato himself accepted. Nevertheless it is also the most obscure, elusive, and frustrating of the arguments, whose intention as well as validity are in continual dispute. It has aptly been compared to an intricate maze, and while it is perhaps appropriate that Socrates, who is portrayed in the dialogue as a kind of Theseus battling the Minotaur of fear of death, should finally pick his way through a labyrinth of distinctions, it is exceptionally difficult for the reader to find the thread and follow it.