Form and good in Plato's Eleatic dialogues

by Kenneth Dorter

Plato's four dialogues are treated here for the first time as a continuous argument. In Dorter's view, Plato re-examines the theory of forms propounded in his earlier dialogues and reaffirms them, not as perfectly robust tools in the service of human knowledge, but as absolutely essential. Thus, Dorter contradicts both those philosophers who would argue that Plato espoused uncritically his initial theory of forms throughout his work and those philosophers who would argue that Plato in some sense rejected the theory of forms and moved toward the kind of categorical analysis later developed by Aristotle. The reader is thus presented with a controversial and novel explanation of the function of the four dialogues discussed. . Dorter presents the Parmenides as a serious critique, not retraction, of the theory of forms. The Parmenides shows that ultimately theory must fall back upon metaphor and analogy - i.e., upon the forms - because alternative approaches are subject to even greater limi