2

Introduction

The major division of opinion between these philosophic giants, for the present purpose, comes to rest upon the issue of coming-into-being, a preoccupation of the Greeks even during the pre-philosophical era. At the time when Plato began to formulate his own arguments, the landscape of Greek intellectual culture had been hugely shaped by Parmenides. Scholars are effectively unanimous in this point of view. The thrust of Parmenides argument, however, has not always been traced out in its fullness, especially in its political implications. At the root of Parmenides argument is his denial that it is possible for true coming-into-being to occur in nature. As scholars have exhaustively studied, Parmenides argument imposed a problem that all subsequent philosophers had to reckon with, as if it had become the fate of Greek thinkers to labor under a heavy, even almost a Sisyphean burden. The refutation of coming-into-being that Parmenides advances is equally a refutation of the ordinary opinions, the objects of which are precisely the perishable objects. There is thus established in Parmenides argument a quite radical disenfranchisement of the ordinary speakers, on matters touching on public truth of fact. Such a relationship has significant political implications. The philosophers known as pluralists who followed Parmenides, at least in the cases of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, indisputably remain entangled in the powerful argument that the Eleatics had articulated. However, both thinkers can be seen to struggle to attempt to alleviate this harsh division between ordinary opinion and science, by confronting, in imperfect ways, Parmenides core argument which alleges to disprove the possibility of coming-into-being. In the case of Platos Socrates, however, the argument of Parmenides is confronted by its most formidable opponent. In the view to be presented here, Platos Socrates succeeds in refuting Parmenides thesis in his famous dialogue Parmenides. Part of the refutation that Platos Socrates enacts in the Parmenides expressly seeks to remove the Eleatic prohibition on the evidentiary value of perceptual ways of knowing; and this too, has extraordinary political implications. In the philosophy of Platos Socrates, philosophy is seen to be rather dependent on the ordinary opinions about the common objects. In fact, in the arguments advanced by Platos Socrates, philosophy has no special knowledge or evidence of its own, with which it could even pretend to supplant the authority inherent in the common assignment of name to object. We will argue that this is what Socrates famous profession of ignorance is about. In the context of this study, in the relationship between the ordinary opinions and philosophic knowledge established by Socrates, the common fund of evidence between these two modes of knowledge have a kinship; it becomes, in this context, entirely defensible to begin talking about Plato himself as in decisive respects a proponent of equalityequality among human beings in their access to truth of fact.