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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: return to a more rational philosophy. The perplexity of the One and Many
is there confined to the region of Ideas, and replaced by a theory of
classification; the Good arranged in classes is also contrasted with the
barren abstraction of the Megarians. The war is carried on against the
Eristics in all the later dialogues, sometimes with a playful irony, at
other times with a sort of contempt. But there is no lengthened refutation
of them. The Parmenides belongs to that stage of the dialogues of Plato in
which he is partially under their influence, using them as a sort of
'critics or diviners' of the truth of his own, and of the Eleatic theories.
In the Theaetetus a similar negative dialectic is employed in the attempt
to define science, which after every effort remains undefined still. The
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