Chapter 1 provides a refreshing historical context for the conversation and introduces the metaphysical themes of the book. Part II, 'Exercise and Rehabilitation,' covers the strategy of the Hypotheses (read: the deductions from hypotheses in the second part of the dialogue), with most attention paid to Hypotheses 1-2, which Sanday thinks set the stage for the rest. The two chapters of Part I explain what Sanday means by scientific philosophy. Not surprisingly, the book is divided into two sections that reflect the structure of the dialogue. So, he thinks, the Parmenides is more broadly a preliminary guide to the philosopher's new stances toward the study of goodness, justice, and beauty. The Parmenides creates 'a space within which we can exercise away our dependencies on the spatio-temporal object and actively cultivate receptivity' to dialectic (6). Sanday claims that the distinction between humans and the world is both a 'threat and well-spring of philosophy' and should be approached in the 'attitude of receptivity,' where one should see intelligibility supplied by the practice of dialectic as a gift (6).

The lesson of the deductions in the second part of the Parmenides is that forms 'enable the spatio-temporal presence of things' yet they retain a 'self-concealing presence' that is prior to the perceptibles (174).

Plato 's resolution of this issue includes demonstrating that one must first clear away misconceptions about the nature of 'is' (4) by means of dialectic, which is 'the project of breaking down basic assumptions in order to recapture the animating source that lives at their core' (8). Such privileging has a distorting effect on our understanding (or lack thereof) and ignores the ultimate sources and principles guiding our pursuit of material goods - in other words, the perceptible things subject to becoming, particularly those of value to us - yet it 'fits neatly into the larger attitude according to which human subjectivity imposes meaning on things' (4). What has steered us away from the truth is an implicit metaphysical assumption that privileges individual things over the conditions for their being as they are. Sanday argues that by dialectical exercise (on his view as a type of education ) and the introduction of scientific philosophy, the Parmenides reveals the 'priority of the sources of intelligibility over individual things' (5). He locates the evidence for his view in the notoriously obscure yet fascinating dialectical exchange in the latter part of the Parmenides, where he finds Parmenides exemplifying the tools required for resolving the puzzles about the Theory of Forms raised earlier in his conversation with Socrates. Eric Sanday's book is an intriguing monograph with a distinctly challenging, tripartite thesis: Plato's Theory of Forms is true, easy to understand, and relatively intuitive.

Parmenides by plato