Plato's Parmenides Reconsidered offers a very accessible, detailed, and historically-sensitive account of Plato's Parmenides. Against the prevailing scholarly wisdom, he illustrates conclusively that Parmenides is a satirical dialogue in which Plato attempts to expose the absurd nature of the doctrines and method of his philosophical opponents.

Plato's Parmenides Reconsidered offers a very accessible, detailed, and historically-sensitive account of Plato's Parmenides. Against the prevailing scholarly wisdom, he illustrates conclusively that Parmenides is a satirical dialogue in which Plato attempts to expose the absurd nature of the doctrines and method of his philosophical opponents.

Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov’s analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov’s interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.

This is Volume III of ten in a series on Ancient Philosophy. First published in 1939, it looks at Parmenides' 'Way of Truth' and Plato's 'Parmendies' translated with an Introduction and a running commentary.

Miller's study demonstrates the value of integrating hermeneutic reading and conceptual analysis. His interpretation works out in detail the purpose and argument of the Parmenides as a whole and provides a new point of departure for discussion of its place in the Platonic corpus. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Among Plato's later dialogues, the Parmenides is one of the most significant. Not only a document of profound philosophical importance in its own right, it also contributes to the understanding of Platonic dialogues that followed it, and it exhibits the foundations of the physics and ontology that Aristotle offered in his Physics and Metaphysics VII. In this book, R. E. Allen provides a superb translation of the Parmenides along with a structural analysis that procedes on the assumption that formal elements, logical and dramatic, are important to its interpretation and that the argument of the Parmenides is aporetic, a statement of metaphysical perplexities. Allen has revised his original translation of and commentary on the Parmenides, which were published in 1983 to great acclaim.