Parmenides in Plato’s Parmenides

This essay examines the role of Parmenides in Plato’s dialogue of the same name. Over against the widely held view that this literary figure exemplifies the philosopher par excellence of an all-encompassing systematic of Eleatic provenience, it is maintained that Parmenides represents a particular frame of mind about certain philosophical matters, namely one which regards forms in a reified manner. It is suggested that by means of the literary figure of Parmenides, Plato is addressing in his dialogue inner-Academic debates about the theory of forms, especially Speusippus’ conception of Unity, which betrays a kind of naive metaphysics of things, as can be seen especially in the first three deductions of the second half of the dialogue.