Abstract

But though the illumination cast on the text by this approach may be only a narrow band of light, it is nevertheless a brilliant one. The hypotheses do in fact, it is shown, lend themselves to treatment as a constructive "metaphysics of unity" in which each stage of the argument explores some further aspect of any entity which is one. This is a topic of genuine concern to all philosophy. Whether we are atomists or Hegelian idealists, our thinking involves decisions as to what constitutes an entity--a "real" unit of being. And once we establish certain conditions as necessary for the existence of anything that is to be some one thing, we find we have made a far reaching and systematic philosophic decision or discovery. The thesis here advanced, that Plato's eight successive discussions of "the one" constructively develop necessary aspects of any unit that can exist, thus relates a problem of Platonic scholarship to philosophy more generally.