Abstract

This book, originally a doctoral dissertation directed by Gottfried Martin and presented to the University of Bonn in 1970, concentrates on the problems which the Parmenides has triggered for more than two thousand years: Is the dialogue a mere dialectical exercise or an introduction to Plato’s own metaphysics or what? Are the hypotheses which constitute its second part logically valid or fallacious? Does Plato seriously intend the apparent contradictions within and between them? How closely related is the second part of the dialogue to the first? Koumakis attempts to solve them in several ways. He substitutes "Wie-Frage" for "Was-Frage". In Ch. 11 he semantically investigates on in Plato and Zeno’s paradoxes. In subsequent chapters he turns to the hypotheses themselves: Plato’s introduction to them in 136A-B, their philological and philosophical underpinnings, the syntactical identity between hypotheses 1 and 2, the possible localization of the one in itself and in the other. In the final section he acknowledges failure in coping with the paradoxical dialogue. Lest anyone be turned away from the book by this acknowledgement, he should realize that it is worth buying for its bibliography alone, as well as for its helpful digests of that literature. Slip-ups in proofreading occur mainly in English quotations.—L.S.