Ein Parmenideskommentar. Studien zur platonischen Dialektik.

?The author deals only with the second part of the dialogue (137c ff.). A large part of the book consists of a close and accurate paraphrase of the argument, which frees it from its tiresome dialogue form. The argument is analysed into nine main positions and seventy-eight subsections. The division into subsections provides an accurate and useful guide to the dialogue. The division into nine positions, which treats 155e-157b, usually regarded as an appendix to the second position, as a separate position, is more questionable. Plato has no consistent formula to introduce each fresh position, and the language at 155e certainly suggests a major break in the argument (?); but the introduction of a ninth position breaks the symmetry of the conventional arrangement of the positions into two groups of four, and 160b and 166c seem on any ordinary interpretation to state definitely that the argument falls into two such fourfold groups. The author?s ninefold division must therefore I think be rejected. The point is of some importance because his interpretation of the dialogue rests largely on this division. He supposes that his nine positions fall into groups of one, four and four. The first position deals with ?the one beyond being?, the new four with the word of existent reality, the last four with the world of appearance. I doubt also if it is legitimate to treat the second part of the dialogue in such complete isolation from the first. The commentary is often helpful, particularly when it cites mathematical analogies, but there are far more fallacies in the argument than those which the author notices, and the difficult question what we are to make of these fallacies is left untouched.? (H.D.P. LEE on the first ed. in The Classical Review, 1937, pp.239-240).