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Platonic Forms in the Theaetetus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

R. Hackforth
R. Hackforth
Affiliation:
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
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Extract

The complete, or almost complete, absence from the Theaetetus of any unequivocal reference to Platonic Forms is a problem, the solution of which appeared to many scholars to have been found and convincingly presented in the late Professor Gornford's book Plato's Theory of Knowledge, published in 1935. Put briefly, his contention was that the main purpose of the dialogue is to show that no acceptable definition of knowledge can be reached if the Forms are left out of account, that there are a number of passages in which any reader of the middle dialogues would see that they were deliberately being left out of account, and one or two, namely in the famous digression on the philosophic life, and in the discussion of ‘common terms’ , where they are actually brought in, though not indeed under the name of

Type
Articles
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 1-2 , January 1957 , pp. 53 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1957

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References

page 53 note 1 I shall be concerned only with the first half (pp. 3-–8) of Mr. Robinson's article.

page 58 note 1 The epistemological digression in this Letter (342 a–344 b) must, I think, be interpreted as referring to the apprehension of every Form, not only to the supreme Form of Good or Beauty, as do the Symp. and Rep. passages. For the distinction between dialectic and knowledge cf. E. Howald, Dieplat. Briefe, p. 43: ‘Die Dialektik und das Ziel der Philosophic stehen also nicht auf einer Ebene miteinander, sondern die Dialektik schafft gleichsam nur die reine und geistige Atmosphare, in der dann die Erevery kenntnis aufblitzen kann.’ I think that dialectic provides more than a pure atmosphere, but the exact relation between it and in the highest and strictest sense is not easy to seize.