Alexander Nehamas Lecture: The Academy at Work: Dialectic in the Parmenides

This episode of The Grindstone features the lecture given by Alexander Nehamas (Princeton University) at Purdue University on Friday, 26 April 2019. The lecture was given at a conference honoring the career of Dr. Patricia Curd, Professor Emerita of the Department of Philosophy at Purdue.The title of the lecture is: "The Academy at Work: Dialectic in the Parmenides".Dr. Nehamas' abstract of the talk is below:Plato’s Parmenides comes in two parts. The first presents several crucial criticisms of Plato’s metaphysics. The second illustrates a dialectical method that Parmenides tells Socrates he must master if he is to answer these criticisms. I try to offer a new account of the metaphysical and linguistic objections of the first part in order to understand better the nature of the dialectic of its second part. I suggest that Parmenides’ demonstration of that method prepares the way for a radical new understanding of Plato’s own theory of Forms and may well be an instance of the actual dialectic practiced during the first, and very obscure, years of Plato’s Academy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.