Bruno Centrone

My paper aims to analyse the Platonic conception of ontological ὰλήθεια and verify whether or not this conception depends on the etymological origin of the Greek word as a derivative noun from λανθάνειν. I shall start my inquiry by referring to Heidegger’s philosophical characterisation of ὰλήθεια as Unverborgenheit, and move on to quote relevant passages from the Homeric poems. I shall try to demonstrate – through the evidence from some key-passages of the Republic, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus and the Philebus – that, even if we can find an ontological conception of the truth in Plato, this does not depend on the Greek etymology of ὰλήθεια, but rather on the archaic correspondance between being and thought.

Platonic eros is a desire that goes beyond love for an individual, being directed toward the world of ideas and culminating in the form of the good/beautiful. We are faced here with an asymmetrical relationship, where the lacking nature of the philosopher as a human being is juxtaposed to the self-sufficiency of the Good as a first principle. In his treatment of the relationships between human beings, however, Plato stresses the need of reciprocity by shaping a symmetrical relation, in which the roles of lover and beloved are closely intermingled. This confusion of roles is well exemplified in the figure of Socrates in the Symposium and in the other so-called erotic dialogues

Towards the end of the Laws the Athenian sets the problem of the unity of virtue in terms of an alternative between a hen , a holon , a hen-holon . These options match with the thesis puts forward in the Protagoras: the different virtues as nothing but names of a single entity, or virtue as something constituted by parts, which are alike to the parts of gold or to the parts of face. The analogy of the face seems to be the option favoured by Plato, who thought of the unity of virtue in terms of an organic totality that does not simply consist in their sum or juxtaposition

Towards the end of the Laws the Athenian sets the problem of the unity of virtue in terms of an alternative between a hen , a holon , a hen-holon . These options match with the thesis puts forward in the Protagoras: the different virtues as nothing but names of a single entity, or virtue as something constituted by parts, which are alike to the parts of gold or to the parts of face. The analogy of the face seems to be the option favoured by Plato, who thought of the unity of virtue in terms of an organic totality that does not simply consist in their sum or juxtaposition