Metaphysics and Method in Plato's Statesman

In this study, Sayre discusses key, but previously obscure, passages in the Statesman.

Kenneth M. Sayre (Author)

9780521866088, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 July 2006

278 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.3 cm, 0.58 kg

Review of the hardback: ' … solid and thought-provoking. Students and scholars of Platonic philosophy will find much to ponder here.' BMCR

At the beginning of his Metaphysics, Aristotle attributed several strange-sounding theses to Plato. Generations of Plato scholars have assumed that these could not be found in the dialogues. In heated arguments, they have debated the significance of these claims, some arguing that they constituted an 'unwritten teaching' and others maintaining that Aristotle was mistaken in attributing them to Plato. In a prior book-length study on Plato's late ontology, Kenneth M. Sayre demonstrated that, despite differences in terminology, these claims correspond to themes developed by Plato in the Parmenides and the Philebus. In this book, he shows how this correspondence can be extended to key, but previously obscure, passages in the Statesman. He also examines the interpretative consequences for other sections of that dialogue, particularly those concerned with the practice of dialectical inquiry.

Part I. Method: 1. Becoming better dialecticians
2. Collection in the Phaedras and the Sophist
3. Division in the Phaedras and the Sophist
4. Collection yields to illustrative paradigms
5. The Weaver Paradigm
6. The Final Definition
Part II. Metaphysics: 7. Excess and deficiency in general
8. The great and the small in Plato's dialogues
9. The generation of everything good and fair
10. Accuracy in the art of dialectic
11. Division according to forms
12. The metaphysics of division.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA]