Plato’s Final Dialogues: On Being and the Forms

Plato’s final dialogues are often regarded as his most perplexing; there is little scholarly consensus about their most basic nature and the purpose of their claims. But a common concern is the doctrine of the Forms—or Plato’s notion that the sensible features of the empirical world can only be explained by reference to their so-called Forms: non-perceptible, immutable, eternal, and indivisible objects accessible only to a pure, non-sensible intellect. Seemingly dissatisfied by his own account, Plato devoted much of his late writing to interrogating what the Forms precisely are, how we know them, and how we can understand the nature of being. And nowhere is this self-criticism more pronounced than in the dialogue Parmenides, in which Plato portrays the eponymous elder philosopher as a devastating critic, and then surprising defender, of the doctrine of the Forms (whose abandonment, the fictional Parmenides proclaims, would “destroy the power of the dialectic entirely.”). In Parmenides (and in other late dialogues), readers are on a dizzying and heady ride through ontological categories like being and non-being, sameness and difference, wholes and parts, likeness and unlikeness, equality and inequality—all in order to ascertain, as if once and for all, the nature of the Forms and of being itself. But how can we understand Plato’s changing conception of the theory of the Forms, from the Phaedo and the Republic to Parmenides and beyond? Are Plato’s self-criticisms ever fully answered—to our satisfaction, and to his?

In this course, we’ll explore Plato’s doctrine of the Forms, centered on a reading of the Parmenides, supplemented by passages from the middle period dialogues Phaedo, Symposium and Republic, as well as from other later works such as Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus.  We’ll puzzle our way through its many labyrinthine arguments in an attempt to understand what the dialogue is trying to tell us, and what Plato’s final metaphysical position is. Is it, as the influential scholar Gregory Vlastos would have it, ultimately a “record of honest perplexity”, or are there more subterranean motives at work?  Is Plato, for example, providing us with the tools with which Parmenides’ objections can be met?  If so, what remains of the Doctrine of the Forms itself?