The Silence of Socrates: The One and the Many in Plato’s Parmenides

• Authors: Barmore Steven
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Parmenides was not a metaphysician (he was a materialist), so there is no such thing as Parmenidean metaphysics. Plato’s Parmenides, however, offers metaphysical insights otherwise overlooked by readers unfamiliar to what St. Thomas Aquinas offers concerning the One and the Many. This article highlights some of these insights and will interest students of St. Thomas. It might also acquaint students of Plato to a more perfect metaphysics, and it could even corrode the beliefs of others who maintain that there is no such thing as metaphysics. The fact that none of the sciences may dispense with the first science is brought heavily to bear upon the reader of the Parmenides, who finds it otherwise impossible to resolve any of the difficulties attendant upon reconciling the One and the Many. The many apparent contradictions between the One and the Many displayed in Plato’s Parmenides really cannot be solved without sound metaphysics, and sound metaphysics cannot proceed unaided by St. Thomas and his inheritors. Go to Thomas to understand Plato’s Parmenides.

Keywords

EN

Parmenides; Plato; Thomas Aquinas; Redpath; the One and the Many; unity; being; potency; act; universal; particular; genus; species; virtual quantity

• Publisher: International Étienne Gilson Society
• Journal: Studia Gilsoniana
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 209-236

Dates

published

2020-06

Contributors

author

Barmore Steven

References

• Aquinas, St. Thomas. De Ente et Essentia. Translated by Armand A. Maurer. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968.
• Aquinas, St. Thomas. Quaestiones disputatae de anima. Corpus Thomisticum. Available online at: https://www.corpusthomisticum.org/qda01.html. Accessed Nov. 30, 2019.
• Aristotle. Metaphysics. In Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 17–18. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1933, 1989. Available online at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0052. Accessed Nov. 30, 2019.
• Feser, Edward. Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009.
• Gilson, Étienne. The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Translated by Edward Bullough. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints, 2003.
• Hancock, Curtis L. “The One and the Many: The Ontology of Science in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.” The Review of Metaphysics 69, no. 2 (2015): 233–259.
• Plato. Parmenides. Translated by John Warrington. London: Everyman’s Library, 1969.
• Plato’s Parmenides. The Perseus Project. Available online at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DParm.; accessed Nov. 30, 2019.
• Redpath, Peter A. A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding St. Thomas Aquinas’s Teaching about the Actual Composition of Essence and Esse in Created Beings: A Chapter in Born-again Thomism (submitted for publication).
• Redpath, Peter A. A Not-So-Elementary Christian Metaphysics: Written in the Hope of Ending the Centuries-old Separation between Philosophy and Science and Science and Wisdom. Vol. 1. St. Louis, Mo.: En Route Books & Media, 2015.
• Redpath, Peter A. “Aquinas’s Fourth Way of Demonstrating God’s Existence: From Virtual Quantum Gradations of Perfection (Inequality of Beauty) of Forms Existing within a Real Genus.” Studia Gilsoniana 8, no. 3 (July–September 2019): 681–716.

Identifiers

ISSN

2300-0066

ISSN

2577-0314

DOI

10.26385/SG.090208