According to S., Plato's ‘chief philosophical’ aim in the Parmenides is twofold: to ‘destabilize the false privileging of individual things’ and to establish the ‘priority of the sources of intelligibility [i.e. forms] over individual things’. S. defends his thesis in five chapters.
Chapters 1 and 2: in the first part of the Parmenides, Parmenides creates perplexities for Socrates, who unwittingly privileges individual things and separates forms from things. The intention of this Zenonian ‘eristic’ dialectic-critique is to educate Socrates.
Chapter 3: the subject of the first hypothesis (H1), ‘if one is’, refers to a pure one, which is neither a form nor a participant. This view belongs to the inexperienced Aristoteles; it commits him to a spatio-temporal one, which is paradoxically not subject to space and time. However, this contradiction already implies its philosophical solution. This is where the more positive ‘scientific dialectic’, which closely resembles the eristic one, begins to emerge.
Chapter 4: the solution is given in H2, which specifies the ‘locative and durative “is”’ that characterises ‘every individual one’. This ‘is’ refers to the ‘eidetic structure of spatio-temporal objects’, that is, to their ‘a-spatial and atemporal’ ground, which is also the ground of their philosophical intelligibility. Thus H2 furnishes ‘the foundation’ of an adequate theory of forms, which holds that the spatio-temporal ‘things are … dependent on a set of eidetic conditions’.
Chapter 5: a more ‘transformed perspective’ is established in the post-H2 exercises. More specifically, ‘the dialectical study’ shows that ‘the instant’, (H2a), ‘the idea of limit and the unlimited (H3), the idea of “veridical predication” (H5), and the idea of appearance (H7)’ are the necessary further eidetic conditions of the now ‘transformed understanding of the spatio-temporal “one”’.
In conclusion, the Parmenides illustrates more successfully than Plato's other dialogues, including the Republic, that ‘the world of appearance is governed by the forms’, which are also the sources of ‘higher intelligibility’. S.'s creative interpretation of the Parmenides is interesting, though it is bound to be controversial.
