Parmenides (dialogue)

Parmenides (Greek: Παρμενίδης) is one of the dialogues of Plato. It is widely considered to be the most challenging and enigmatic of Plato's dialogues.

The Parmenides purports to be an account of a meeting between the two great philosophers of the Eleatic school, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, and a young Socrates. The occasion of the meeting was the reading by Zeno of his treatise defending Parmenidean monism against those partisans of plurality who asserted that Parmenides' supposition that there is a one gives rise to intolerable absurdities and contradictions. The dialogue is set during a supposed meeting between Parmenides and Zeno of Elea in Socrates' home city of Athens. The dialogue is chronologically the earliest of all, as Socrates is only nineteen years old, so he takes the unusual position of the student, while Parmenides serves as the lecturer.

Most scholars agree that the dialogue does not record historic conversations and is most likely an invention by Plato.

Discussion with Socrates

The heart of the dialogue opens with a challenge by Socrates to the elder and revered Parmenides and Zeno. Employing his customary method of attack, the reductio ad absurdum, Zeno has argued that if—as the pluralists say—things are many, then they will be both like and unlike; but this is an impossible situation, for unlike things cannot be like, nor like things unlike. But this difficulty vanishes, says Socrates, if we are prepared to make a distinction between sensibles, on one hand, and Forms (in which sensibles participate) on the other.