John Palmer

Prodicus of Ceos was a major figure of the sophistic movement in Greece during the latter part of the fifth century bc. He features in a number of Platonic dialogues in ways that suggest he was regarded by Socrates more sympathetically than the other sophists. Robert Mayhew has undertaken to present and discuss all the extant textual evidence for Prodicus’ life and thought. The presentation consists of ninety pieces of mostly Greek and some Latin texts, ranging from a few lines to a few pages, accompanied by facing English translation and organized topically under four main headings—Life and Character ; Language ; Natural Philosophy, Cosmology, and Religion ; and Ethics.

This study aims to provide a historically accurate assessment of Plato's crucial engagement with Parmenides. It proceeds by establishing the recoverable features of Plato's middle and later period reception and developing interpretations of the relevant portions of Parmenides' poem in accordance with the parameters determined by this reception, only at which point is it possible to assess Parmenides' influence on Plato. Part I surveys certain Parmenidean elements in Plato's middle period eschatology and epistemology before focusing on the relation between Parmenides B2, B3, B6, B8.34-36 and the argument at Republic 5.467e4-477b11 and developing readings that support Aristotle's attribution to each thinker of an "argument from the possibility of knowledge" . Next I demonstrate the close relation between Plato's description of the sight-lovers and Parmenides' criticisms of mortals, discussing along the way Antisthenes, Hippias, and Gorgias as thinkers whom Plato would class as sight-lovers for refusing the key assumptions of his version of APK. Part I concludes with an interpretation of Parmenides' conception of doxa and its objects in accordance with the Platonic appropriation. Part II considers Plato's later view of Parmenides, particularly in the Sophist, in light of the results of Part I. I begin by discussing the representation of the Parmenidean thesis in the Theaetetus and the opening exchanges of the Parmenides. I then show how the Sophist brings Plato's own understanding of Parmenides into direct conflict with several recognizably sophistic appropriations, from which Plato is concerned to recover the Parmenidean legacy. Consideration of the doxography of views on the number of onta at 242cff. suggests that the association of Parmenides with Xenophanes is one key to Plato's later view of Parmenides. This suggestion finds confirmation in the Parmenidean/Xenophanean description of the world soul in the Timaeus. I thus attempt to reconstruct the view of Xenophanes' God in the fourth century before proceeding to develop an interpretation of Parmenides in accordance with the later Platonic reception. The result is a reading according to which Parmenides' principal thesis is that the universe is One qua Being

The speaker who self-identifies as a god after the painter analogy in Empedocles’ On nature cannot be Empedocles himself, since other fragments make it clear that he does not regard himself as a god. This paper accordingly advances and explores the hypothesis that the speaker here is the Muse Kalliopeia, who is elsewhere invoked by Empedocles and identified for Pausanias as the source of his more than mortal understanding. This hypothesis is seen to resolve several tensions and difficulties in the fragments, particularly with respect to the otherwise contradictory attitude toward humans’ cognitive potential. It also brings into focus a number of connections between Empedocles’ On nature and its generic models in Parmenides and the Hesiodic Theogony. Recognizing that the majority of On nature’s main didactic content likely took the form of a report by Empedocles of a revelation he once received from Kalliopeia also brings into focus the identity and function of what he describes for Pausanias as her assurances. These are the appeals to things belonging to the domain of everyday experience in which her human auditor can discern the operation of the same principles operative in the larger cosmos that are only accessible by revelation. The appeal to the familiar operation of Love in his own body to engender confidence in her claim regarding Love’s operation as a principle of unification and harmony throughout the cosmos is the most important example.

In this ambitious and highly original study, McCabe presents an intricately structured argument designed to demonstrate Plato’s concern with fundamental issues of rationality and personhood. In doing so, she pursues themes announced in her Plato’s Individuals and in Form and Argument in Late Plato, a collection she co-edited with Christopher Gill. The development of her position via consideration of the philosophical importance of characterization and the dialogue form in the Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus leads her to focus in particular on Plato’s depiction of his predecessors. These include, firstly, the Theaetetus’s Protagoras and Heraclitean flux theorists and the Sophist’s Parmenides and materialist giants, all “mean-minded opponents” whose views threaten the very possibility of rational inquiry. Refutation of them, accordingly, is Plato’s means of establishing certain basic principles of reason.

This essay argues that Empedocles envisaged the elemental “roots” fire, water, earth, and air as having their own life cycles and undergoing their own transformations like virtually everything else in his system except Love and Strife. Empedocles conceives of the elements’ destruction and generation in terms of their losing and recovering their distinctive qualitative identities as they intermingle through Love’s agency and grow apart through Strife’s. This result makes it possible to understand the crucial verses Physika I.234–36 as Empedocles’ general description of the dual processes involved in the generation and destruction of all specimen compounds.

Anyone interested in the influence of Presocratic thought may be tempted to begin with Plato and Aristotle. There is, however, sufficient evidence of Presocratic influence among the sophists to make it clear that this temptation should be resisted. Some traces of this earlier influence may be found in Plato and Aristotle themselves, and this fact should serve as a reminder that their own involvement with Presocratic philosophy did not take place in a vacuum but will have been conditioned or mediated by previous developments. This article deals with classical thinkers who interpreted, wrote about, and preserved the Presocratics, pointing out that just as one must read the Presocratics through the filters of Plato and Aristotle and their successors and commentators, Plato and Aristotle were influenced by the already burgeoning tradition of historiography that developed in the late fifth and fourth centuries.