>>25596539
Stop making these retarded fucking threads and just nut up and read Parmenides' fragments already
It'll take like ten minutes and then everything will make sense, and if it doesn't, this shit isn't for you. Go fuck yourself

We've looked at the data, and, according to Facts and Logic, the soul is immortal.

>>25596698
May I take a look at the data myself?

He’s showing how objections to his theory of Forms and theology in general rest on false dichotomies. It is also a recapitulation of his so-called “unwritten doctrines” with Being as a screen for the Dyad, he talks about how Numbers are generated and so on, should be straightforward if you know your Aristotle. Being=Multiplicity=Existence in time=Evil, blablabla and so on. Hegel stupidly reads it as a work of crude ‘dialectic’ when the subtext is all speculative, it is anti-dialectical. What you should ask yourself is: why being? Does Plato really have a place for it or what? This in a nutshell is what motivates Platonic/Aristotelian philosophy moving forward; modern philosophy emerges from the trauma of this question.

>>25596539
If you can’t see the connection between these arguments and the arguments from the beginning of the dialogue… This isn’t even 4D chess it is the normal kind. Think about how Parmenides describes his method. In order to make sense of unity and plurality he is dividing them, in dividing he makes them unintelligible but also exhaustively analyzes them. Recall the divided line from the Republic. These exercises are dianoetic but they point toward another, higher mode of knowing. Here from the Republic:
>And when I speak of the other division of the intelligible, you will understand me to speak of that other sort of knowledge which reason herself attains by the power of dialectic, using the hypotheses not as first principles, but only as hypotheses – that is to say, as steps and points of departure into a world which is above hypotheses, in order that she may soar beyond them to the first principle of the whole
Literally exactly what he is doing. The Parmenides isn’t even all that esoteric. It’s a dianoetic picture of theology and the relation of good and evil and the limitations of discursive thought.

>>25596539
Sure you're not projecting? This passage reads like a straightforward analysis of the concepts of same and different, within time.

>>25596539
Parmenides is by far the least entertaining and the most difficult Plato dialogue I’ve read. I’m honestly surprised it’s a very late dialogue, because Plato is generally a very good writer, and yet he wrote something so dry and devoid of wit so late in his life?

>>25596539
He's making two arguments.

Argument 1:
>Sameness and difference are opposites.
>Therefore, difference cannot exist within sameness.
>But any particular being is the same being, at least for some time.
>Therefore, difference cannot exist within any being.
>Therefore, neither the One nor anything else can possess difference.
>Therefore, the One cannot be different from anything else.

Argument 2:
>Anything that has a number must consist of countable units.
>Every countable unit is one thing.
>But the things that are completely not-one cannot possess oneness.
>Therefore, they cannot be countable units.
>Therefore, they cannot constitute a number.

This isn't a schizophrenic meltdown, but rather a very heady and abstract way to approach several problems in metaphysics, including identity, difference, change, number, and of course Plato's famous concept of participation. And since the naive conception of forms, where forms belong to each thing or quality proper, appears to break down underneath this assault in Parmenides, Plato's theory of forms ends up taking on a more relational and web-like quality in successive dialogues such as Sophist.

>>25598721
Lmao, you can feel the color begin to seep away from the page as Parmenides and Aristotle (not that one) get immersed in the hypotheses. He probably wrote it that way for a reason.

He’s writing a hypothetical monist rebuke to the Forms theory (real Parmenides obv lived long before Dualism and forms of Plato).

>Parmenides: But neither do the things not-one become one; otherwise they would not be not one, but somehow one.
>Socrates: True.
>Parmenides: So the things not one could not be a number either; for in that case, too, they would not be absolutely not one, since they would at least have number.
>Socrates: Yes, you’re quite right.

This is a rephrasing of the old Parmenides’ adage that “things that are not can not be thought or intuited.” You can’t think of things that are not because the One is all there is.

>>25599356
That's not quite the argument. Parmenides is hammering Socrates on the separability of Forms. Socrates doesn't think they can mix, and a consequence is that traits that would have to be true of Forms, like Sameness partaking of Oneness in order to be a single differentiable and individual Form, can't be explained, by Socrates' account.

>>25598721
Well, it's the only dialogue where Plato depicts Socrates talking with another philosopher instead of being a listening bystander (Timaeus, Sophist, Statesman all have Socrates just listening and observing). Presumably the dryness and difficulty are on account of this being philosophy portrayed in its least varnished form in his dialogues.

>>25599409
> Socrates doesn't think they can mix, and a consequence is that traits that would have to be true of Forms,

I imagine Socrates here is just supposed to be a dumb kid with an intentionally not yet formalized ideology? Real adult Plato absolutely thought forms could mix. Example, Laches where he says (the form) Honor is “knowledge of virtue” ie Honor and virtue partake of one another.

>>25599417
Certainly, though it may also be the case that Plato, through the depiction of a Socrates who hasn't worked through very much, is countering a mistake that it'd be easy to fall prey to in reading the other dialogues too cavalierly.