Riassunto di Parmenide

Punto chiave 1 di 6

A young Socrates meets two old masters

The dialogue is framed as a story passed down through several people. A man named Cephalus travels from Clazomenae to Athens and asks Antiphon to retell a famous conversation. Antiphon learned it long ago from Pythodorus, a friend of Zeno who was present. Antiphon is the half-brother of Plato's own brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, so Plato places his family inside the chain of memory.

The meeting itself is set during the great festival of the Panathenaea. Parmenides is described as about sixty-five years old, with white hair and a noble look. Zeno is nearly forty. Socrates is very young. Parmenides was the philosopher who argued that what is must be one and unchanging, and that change and plurality are illusions of the senses. Zeno was famous for defending him by showing that the opposite view leads to absurd results.

Zeno reads aloud from a book of his. Its argument runs like this. If things are many, then they must be both like and unlike, and that is impossible, so things are not many. Socrates listens closely and then says that Zeno and Parmenides are saying the same thing in different words. Parmenides says all is one, and Zeno shows that the many cannot be.

Zeno answers that his book was a youthful work, meant to defend Parmenides against those who mocked him. He did not write it to claim fame as a teacher. Plato uses this scene to set up the problem. Before any theory of Forms appears, the reader sees what is at stake: whether it is absurd for one thing to hold opposite qualities.