Caesar Book

Parmenides is the most intriguing of plato's dialogues. I like this dialogue for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the usual roles are reversed. Socrates here is a young and inexperienced lad and he is the one to be cross examined. Secondly it features Parmenides, whose metaphysics is very interesting.

First part of the dialogue deals with the internal inconsistencies and the incompleteness of the theory of forms. Here Plato criticises his own theory through Parmenides by reductio ad absurdum arguments. He deals with the problems that arise with the properties like Self predication and uniqueness of forms.
Reminded me of the paradox that comes with a set of all sets that are not members of themselves.

In the second part, Parmenides decides to defend the forms through some convoluted reasoning and starting with the hypothesis,
If it is one/if one is.
But no consensus is reached at the end regarding "the one". I can only assume that this dialogue was intended as an epistemological and metaphysical work to challenge our basic assumptions of knowledge.Or probably as a dialogue to make us better understand the forms, by showing the properties like uniqueness, purity and self predication to be false.