Abstract

Dialectical Eidology presents a new format for the interpretation of a series of Plato's late dialogues, focused on Parmenides. It differs from metaphysical, structuralist, logical and semanticist approaches in maintaining that Parmenides represents Plato's initial systematic exposition of the implications of the fact that the original eidetic turn of Phaedo 100) took place only within the context of the original dialectical turn : Phaedo 99). The parallel between doctrine and method has been noted in previous treatments of platonic works; as also that the earlier, socratic, dialogues exhibit only a rudimentary form of dialectic compared with that of Parmenides and Sophist. But the present study asserts that the significance of the interrelation of doctrine and method has never been exposed in the case of Parmenides, in that the new eidological doctrine of its first part directly relates to the puzzling results of the second part . The novel doctrinal departure consists in the assertion that eide, to be available for dialectical inspection, must be seen to be mutually participatory or communal; that Plato's previous eideticism had been only eidetic-specific of access, in the belief that such delimitation was essential to fixing the eidos, conceived monoeidetically); that the is thus much more far-reaching than interpretation of it suggests; and that, in seeing that eide themselves--and not just their participants--must be communal, Plato has made eidetics eidological: concerned with what any possible eidos would have to be to be an eidos. Parmenides' eight hypotheses exhibit the consequences of the new doctrine as contrasted with the old, in that Parm. 135-137's by-rule is shown to mean: Consider the topic-eidos non-communally , and then consider the same topic-eidos communally and see the results for doctrine and method in each case. It is then shown that neo- and late platonic reactions took the form of evading the consequences of this communal eideticism through the vehicle of plotinian noeric eideticism , in which Mind and the One are seen as just eidetic-specific