Abstract

In this paper, the author argues that the revelatory form Parmenides gives his poem poses considerable problems for the account of being contained therein. The poem moves through a series of problems, each building on the last: the problem of particularity, the cause of human wandering that the goddess would have us ascend beyond ; the problem of speech, whose heterogeneity evinces its tie to experience’s particularity ; the problem of justice, which motivates man’s ascent from his “insecure” place in being, only ultimately to undermine it ; and finally the question of the good, the necessary consequence of man’s place in being as being out-of-place in being. What emerges is a Socratic reading of Parmenides’s poem, a view that Plato appears to have shared by using Parmenides and his Eleatic stranger to frame the bulk of Socrates’s philosophic activity.