Abstract

The pedagogic intention of this unusual book is to present a unified picture of the whole of Plato, taking his metaphysical position with a seriousness rare in Anglo-American Plato-scholarship. The substance of the work depends on three claims. First, eide are not postulated or secondary entities, alongside sensibles. For Findlay, it is the eide which are ultimately real; the proper characterization of the being of sensibles is as "parasitic" on the original entities, the eide. There is a gradation of being, and eide rather than sensibles are the measure. Beneath the full reality of the eide lies the partial or relative non-being of sensibles, and then the absolute non-being which Findlay identifies with the chora of Timaeus 52b. Above the reality of eide are their principles: the One, and the Dyad. Second, Findlay claims that even from the earliest dialogues in which the eide are suggested, Plato envisioned but did not complete a program of mathematizing the eide, and of using this mathematicization to account for the relation between the principles of eide and the sensible instantiations of the eide. This program, Findlay says, had to do with establishing ratios between eide, but is not described further than this. Third, as an exegetic requirement, Findlay has stated that this Prinzipienlehre is fully consistent with, and elucidated and supported by, the reports of Aristotle and of his commentators, especially Syrianus. This is, of course, the "unwritten doctrine" to which the title of the book alludes. Perhaps the greatest value of the work is that it challenges the prevalent interpretative opinion, supported by Professor Cherniss’ "almost superhuman scholarship," that the Aristotelian reports are distortions of Plato, and thus to be discounted, while the "real Plato" is in the dialogues alone.