1. John N. Findlay claims that the conclusions of all these arguments amount to the “whole truth,” which can only be expressed “in the complete round of our utterances.” John N. Findlay, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (New York: Routledge, 1974), 252–53. Findlay’s interpretation has a Hegelian ring to it. Georg W. F. Hegel says of Parmenides’s final, overall conclusion that “this result may seem strange” to those who are “far from accepting … quite abstract determinations,” which “show themselves dialectically and are really the identity with their ‘other;’ and this is the truth.” However, Hegel also says the dialectic in Parmenides is “not to be regarded as complete in every regard … The embracing of the opposites in one, and the expression of this unity, is chiefly lacking in the Parmenides, which has hence … only a negative result.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1894), 56–60. For an interesting critique of Hegel’s assumptions, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), Ch. 1.
2. Samuel Scolnicov argues that part I leads to aporia, and part II leads to euporia. Scolnicov insists that the conclusions of part II are hypothetical and thus depend on their suppositions. Furthermore, the eight arguments exercise two different modes of being, independent and dependent. The puzzle Plato wants to solve is the puzzle of participation—that is, how the independent Forms become many in and through participating in the other beings, which depend on Forms. Reversely, “the being of the many depends on the being of the one.” Somehow, Scolnicov assumes that part II shows the necessity of “an ontology of mutual participation of forms in each other and unidirectional participation of sensible things in Forms.” (Perhaps, given his main argument, Scolnicov means the participation of Forms in sensible things.) In a nutshell, Plato solves his own dilemma, raised in part I, by overcoming the Eleatic ontology. The first four arguments accomplish Plato’s mission, and the last four indicate the contrast between Plato’s new accomplishment and the historical Parmenides’s account. However, the Parmenidean one is still retained. Samuel Scolnicov, Plato’s Parmenides (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 166.
3. Samuel C. Packless thinks Plato is exclusively concerned with undoing his middle-period TF—especially with what he calls the radical purity (BP) of Forms (RP means that “no form can have contrary properties.”) Packless assumes, in a rather nonchalant manner, that “the one” of each hypothesis has the same meaning in all eight hypotheses, all of which he, one way or another, links to RP. He claims that part II is a general refutation of RP, which evolves into the replacement of RP with Forms that are “more prosaic, laid low, sharing features with the sensible world they were originally [in the middle-period dialogues] were meant to outshine.” Samuel C. Packless, Plato’s Forms in Transition: A Reading of the Parmenides (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 100, 240.
4. As Richard Robinson aptly argues, “it is surely inconceivable that Plato meant us to find a positive doctrine [in part II].” Richard Robinson, “Plato’s Parmenides I,” Classical Philology 37 (1942): 51–76, 51.
5. As Taylor points out, “the dialogue provides no solution of the problems it has raised.” Alfred E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (New York: Methuen, 1926), 360. Owen agrees, but for a different reason—namely, that the TF has been devastatingly undermined by Parmenides’s criticism in part I, and for this reason, there is no solution to be provided in part II or elsewhere.