Huaiyuan Zhang

Plato's view on time, a key aspect of his doctrine of forms, is influenced by his reception of Parmenides, but the way in which Plato takes up and modifies Parmenides' view is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. In this article, the author analyzes Plato's revision of Parmenidean time by exploring four temporalities: the eternal present, timeless eternity, the enduring present, and the instant between time and eternity. Through this examination, she uncovers the common origin of both the eternal present of Parmenides' fragment B8 and the flowing present of the phenomenal realm in the instant (ἐξαίφνης) in Plato's Parmenides. This perspective on time offers a promising solution to Plato's problem of participation, bridging the gap between the eternal being of the form and the being in time of the particulars.

Has philosophy ever completed a transition from divine revelation to rational reflection? Has it been Plato’s goal? In this paper I will establish and examine a parallel between divination and philosophy embodied in Plato’s Socrates. I will cite instances from both directions to analyze Plato’s indecision concerning a philosophical treatment of divination: On the one hand, Plato renovates the cultural stock of divination to supplement the rational process of Socratic dialectics. In particular, when he makes a proposal not as a proven proposition, but as the starting point of discussion, Socrates frequently helps himself to divinatory language. On the other hand, Plato does not seem to abandon the nondiscursive elements in his narrative, especially since the vision of the ultimate objective of the Platonic-Socratic project, i.e. the Good, requires a resort to divination. The indecision is reflected in the textual ambivalence as to whether the being of the Good transcends other forms or is on a par with other forms as the noblest form. Based on the correlation between the power of knowledge and the object of knowledge, I will argue that the epistemic entanglement of divination with reason in Plato’s approach corresponds to the ambiguous relationship between being and the Good in Plato’s ethically imbued metaphysical scheme. Since Plato presents Socrates as a seer in the aforementioned occasions, I will further suggest that Plato presents himself as a collector of oracles by preserving Socratic’s teaching in writing, whose ultimate meanings are open to interpretation and debate.

Since Narcissus sees himself seeing himself, i.e., comes to self‑ consciousness and plunges into self‑destruction under the gaze, thinkers have problematized the Delphic maxim of “knowing thyself” from a visual perspective. In this trend, psychoanalysis joins the self‑criticism of phenomenology in subverting the “myth” of the self‑reflective consciousness. Whereas Lacan relegates the mirror stage to the Imaginary and interprets the gaze as objet a to account for the split in the subject, Merleau‑Ponty overcomes the narcissistic enclosure of the tacit cogito by appealing to the self’s abandonment to the gaze of the other in an open‑circuit of the reversible flesh. Through the lens of the topological concept of parallax, this study illuminates the fundamental distinctions between these two perspectives and proposes a promising future of psychoanalytic phenomenology.