Why the Parmenides or Menexenus ?
The starting point of my criticism of the current view on the dialogues is the underlying image it gives of Plato. I cannot admit that a man whose influence on all subsequent schools of thought was so great could have written a dialogue such as the Parmenides for the sole purpose of telling the world he had found a glitch in his earlier theories, had nothing better to propose in their place, but would in the meantime amuse his readers by showing Parmenides at work in some “tedious game” ; or a dialogue such as the Menexenus for the sole purpose of showing Athens how much better he was than the rhetors at their own games, after having criticized them all his life. I cannot admit the assumption that the simplistic theory that Aristotle criticizes as Plato so called “theory of forms” was actually what Plato held, and that Aristotle was better at interpreting Plato than Plato himself, just because he was posterior to him and that, by the “evolutionist” token, posterior is of necessity bett
