* INTRODUCTION This book seeks to add dimension to our understanding of Greek Skepticism by concentrating attention on a particular area that is of ...

Tradução para o português do verbete sobre Sexto Empírico, de Charlotte Stough, retirado de Jonathan Dancy e Ernest Sosa (org.) A Companion to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 475-477.

In what follows I propose to consider the relevance of Plato's early claim that his Forms are explanatory to the structure of, and several of the main arguments of, the Parmenides. The first section of the paper looks into some implications of separate existence, exploring connections between the criticism of separation and the conception of Forms as explanatory principles. I focus attention on what the Forms do not explain, and suggest that the burden of much of Parmenides’ criticism centers on (...) that question. Part two deals with Plato's evidently changing stance on the issue of explaining the Forms themselves. The third section takes up passages from the Parmenides in support of the view that Plato came to believe that his Forms stood in need of the same sort of explanation as he had originally thought was required for sensory particulars. The discussion is largely exploratory, and the connections adumbrated are intended as guidelines for further investigation. (shrink)

A familiar tradition in Plato scholarship has it that self-predication is one of the most important issues to be settled in an attempt to understand Plato‘s metaphysical views. Perhaps only latent in the initial formulations of the theory of Forms, the problem becomes manifest in the Parmenides, especially in the Third Man Argument where the assumption that a Form can have the property that it is helps to generate a vicious regress destructive of the notion of a single Form over (...) many particulars. (shrink)