Plato's "Parmenides"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Plato's theory of Forms, as presented in "Parmenides", is founded on the assumption that a higher, spiritual realm of Forms, or Ideas, exists beyond the world of physical things. The author points out that Plato was influence by pre-Socratic thinkers such as Pythagoras, who believed that all things are in number and that the universe is created and ruled by certain numerical principles, Parmenides, who built his philosophical structure around the concept of One, and Heraclitus, who perceived the world as a perpetual transformation of things into their opposites. The paper relates that Plato's "Parmenide"s has influenced many of the thinkers of the Western World such as Plotinus, Proclus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Nicholas Cusanus and GWF Hegel.

From the Paper:

"Although in the "Phaedo" dialogue, Socrates seems to describe the theory of Forms as a very familiar concept that he has applied for a long time without any difficulties, "Parmenides", which is a dialogue of the second period, contains a set of criticisms of this theory. Therefore, scholars have asked themselves whether Plato had two distinct philosophies, an earlier and a later, or whether the main objective that Plato was trying to achieve by writing the first dialogues was to conserve the memory of Socrates, by presenting his ideas, although from a Platonic perspective, while the later dialogues contain Plato's own distinctive ideas."

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