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Platonic Causes
DAVID SEDLEY

ABSTRACT This paper examines Platos ideas on cause-effect relations in the Phaedo. It maintains that he sees causes as things (not events, states of affairs or the like), with any information as to how that thing brings about the effect relegated to a strictly secondary status. This is argued to make good sense, so long as we recognise that aition means the thing responsible and exploit legal analogies in order to understand what this amounts to. Furthermore, provided that we do not presuppose that we already know what can and what cannot count as a cause, Plato proves to have an attractive case for his principle that all causation is a matter of like causing like. Once we appreciate this, we are a little closer to understanding his more idiosyncratic principle, which although puzzling is ubiquitous in his writings and often invoked as a premise in key arguments, that opposites cannot cause opposites. The last part of the paper turns to formal causes, defending Platos advocacy of them, and examining their role in the Parmenides Third Man Argument. The main proposal is that Platos conception of Forms as causes opens the door to a better version of that arguments Non-identity premise than those currently available.

Socrates retreated to his Second Voyage, his reliance on the hypothesis that each property of a thing is caused by the appropriate Form: F things are (or become) F because of the F. However, later on (105b-c) he seems to allow a more subtle kind of cause, namely that F things should be made F by the presence of something which essentially brings the Form F-ness with it, in the way that re, being essentially hot, by its presence in things makes them hot. Plato favours the following range of locutions to express what appears to be his notion of cause: (1) ation/ata: cause/causation 1 (2) di + accusative, or causal dative: because of (3) poien = to cause (to), to make (F) (99b7, 100d5) These, leaving aside syntactic differences, are to all appearances used interchangeably throughout, and there is every reason to conclude that they combine to represent for Plato a unitary notion of cause. He is ready to consider a variety of competing claimants to the description cause, admitting only some of them as satisfying all the relevant criteria. But those criteria, regarding what in principle may or may not count as a cause, do no themselves appear to shift. The adjective atiow followed by a genitive means responsible for. To give the cause (ation) of x is to point to the thing responsible (t ation) for x, and thereby to assign to that thing the responsibility (ata) for x much in the way that a lawcourt seeks to determine the person responsible for a crime, or to attribute the responsibility. When I say the thing responsible, my word thing is deliberately vague. Plato does not in this context show the slightest interest in distinguishing between metaphysically different kinds of thing: the thing considered as a candidate for the cause of some effect can just as well be a physical stuff like re or bone, a mathematical process like addition, the good, a soul, intelligence, or a Form such as Largeness or Oddness. What determines the success or failure of the candidate cause is nothing to do with its metaphysical status, 2 but purely, as we shall see, its logical or quasi-logical relation to the effect.
Accepted September 1997 1 Michael Frede (The original notion of cause, in M. Scho eld et al. (ed.), Doubt and Dogmatism (Oxford 1980), 217-49, points to a distinction in the Phaedo between ation, cause, and ata, causal account vel sim. I think that there is a tendency in this direction, although Plato is not entirely consistent about it, cf. esp. 98d7-e1, 101c4-5. 2 The contrary assumption is a major weakness in an in uential article with which

I. What is a cause? The nal argument of Platos Phaedo seeks to show that such is the souls causal role as the bringer of life to the body that it itself must be essentially alive; therefore on the approach of the opposite property, death, it is unable to perish, and must instead take the only alternative option, to withdraw. In order to prepare the ground for this argument, Socrates recounts his own intellectual progress with regard to the correct understanding of causation (96a-102a). In his youth, he explains, his search for the causes of things led him to consider all sorts of unsuitable candidates for this role, items which did not on re ection turn out to be properly correlated to the effects they were postulated to explain. Nor was he, as he had hoped to be, enlightened by the writings of Anaxagoras, who, having promised to explain the world as the product of an intelligence, in the event named as causes the same kind of unsatisfactory items as others did air, water, aether etc. This, in Socrates view, was as useless as it would be to cite as the cause of Socrates sitting in prison, not his intelligence, but his bones, sinews etc. In his disappointment at Anaxagoras,
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1998 Phronesis XLIII/2

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Standardly, it is the thing itself, rather than some fact or event involving it, that Plato nominates as cause, much as in a legal context a person, rather than an event involving that person, is ultimately nominated as responsible for, or guilty of (atiow), the crime. Occasionally in this passage of the Phaedo , however, what is nominated as the cause is not a simple thing but a complex process, event or fact involving it. This complex description, it turns out, can be used interchangeably with a simple reference to the thing which features in it (96e2-4, cf. 101b4-7; 98d-99a; 100d3-8). For example, if 10 is greater than 8 because of 2 having been added to it, that turns out to be equivalent to saying that 10 is greater than 8 by 2 or because of 2 (causal dative). Which of these two is meant to be the more precise formulation of the cause? It is often assumed that the fuller formulation must be the more correct, but there seems to me to be strong evidence against any such presumption. At 100d3-e3 Socrates rst uses this fuller type of formulation what makes things beautiful is, he hypothesises, the presence or sharing (or whatever it may be) of the Form of Beautiful. However, he then declines to specify the nature of that Form-particular relationship (for I dont go so far as to insist on that: o gr ti toto diisxurzomai, d6-7), and instead strips the causal statement down to what he declares to be its completely safe kernel: It is because of [causal dative] the beautiful that all beautiful things are beautiful.3 I read this as strong evidence that the essence of a causal statement lies in its nominating the item which functions as the cause, and that any further statement about how the item achieves its effect is secondary. This again invites a legal analogy: ultimately the jury must decide that you were responsible (atiow) for the murder; how you brought it about strangulation, starvation, poisoning etc. is secondary when it comes to the apportionment of guilt or responsibility. Platos pared down causal statement here, It is because of the F that F things are F, claims to be utterly safe infallible. Frequently in his
I can nd no common ground at all: G. Vlastos, Reasons and causes in the Phaedo, Philos. Rev. 78 (1969), 291-325, repr. in his Platonic Studies (Princeton 1973). 3 At 101b-d it turns out that to say It is F because it participates in the F itself is already safer than to cite a clever cause of the type already exposed as bogus. But only It is F because of the F is completely safe ( sfalstaton ): see 100d. Socrates unapologetic use of metxein and its cognates in the former passage, at 101c, as also already at 100c5, counts against the usual assumption that his refusal at 100d6-7 to specify the Form-particular relationship is a confession of ignorance or uncertainty about it, and thus supports my proposal that he is, rather, demoting it to the status of secondary relevance in causal contexts.

dialogues propositions with this form are treated as self-evident truths: for example, that it is because of wisdom that the wise are wise, because of temperance that the temperate are temperate.4 Moreover, Plato is by no means alone in treating causation along these lines. What is essentially the same principle that like causes like can be traced back to Anaxagoras (B10), and forward to Aristotle (especially Metaphysics Z 9)5 and Hellenistic debate. Conversely, and more idiosyncratically, Plato often treats as selfevidently impossible statements to the effect that it is because of the un-F that F things are F, where un-F is, in some sense recognised by Plato, the opposite of F. The language used to express such an impossibility is both strong and explicit. Here are some prominent examples: Phd. 68d: that someone should be brave because of cowardice is irrational or illogical ( logon). Phd. 68e: that people should be temperate because of intemperance is impossible ( dnaton). Phd. 100a-b: that someone should be large because of something small is weird (traw). Parmenides 131c-d: it will be illogical ( logon) if Forms are divided up, so that what causes large things to be large is a relatively small part of Largeness. Republic I 335c-d: that musicians should because of their music make people unmusical, or the just because of their justice make people unjust, is impossible ( dnaton). Protagoras 355d: that people should do what is bad because they are overcome by what is good is ridiculous (geloon). (That the talk of being overcome by something states the cause of the behaviour in question has been made explicit back at 352d8, ation, and 353a1, di tata.) Theaetetus 199d: that knowledge should cause ignorance, ignorance cause knowledge, or blindness cause seeing is a great illogicality (poll loga). It seems abundantly clear that Plato sees some causal relationships, of the the F makes things F type, as conceptually self-evident, and others, of the the F makes things un-F type, as unthinkable. It is hard not to conclude, both from his attitude and from the language used ( logon etc.), that Plato sees the basic causal relationship as a matter of logic , on a par
4 5

Tht. 145d11, Protag. 332a8-b1, Hp.Ma. 287c-d, 289d. See J. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London 1979), I 118-19.

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with the self-evident truth of tautologies and the self-evident falsity of self-contradictions. The question is, what is it about his view of cause that makes these matters so self-evident? First, it is worth remarking that his abhorrence at opposites causing opposites somehow re ects a broader abhorrence at the idea that one of a pair of opposites might in any way characterise the other. According to the Phaedo (102b-103c), a pair of opposites like small and large may coexist in the same object, taking it in turns to advance and retreat according to the relation in which the object is currently being viewed, and one of them will succeed the other in a process of change like growth. But, emphatically, they will never dare to be characterised by each other: the large in you will never become small. In the Parmenides (129b-e) Socrates urges at length and in the strongest possible terms that, while any particular may unproblematically participate in both of a pair of opposites, it would be bizarre (traw), amazing etc. if Likeness itself were unlike, if One itself were many, and in general if the actual genera and species displayed their opposites within themselves, undergoing these opposites as affections (129c). Yet again in the Sophist (252d), that motion should be at rest or rest be in motion is by the greatest necessities impossible (taw megstaiw ngkaiw dnaton). Or, to take an adverbial version of the same abhorrence, in the Theaetetus (189c-d; cf. Rep. 382a4-5) Socrates is worried by the description of something as truly false, which he compares to slowly quick, heavily light or any other opposite coming about not in accordance with its own nature but in the opposite way to itself, in accordance with the nature of its own opposite. Still in the Sophist it is quite bizarre (mla topon) according to the sophist (240b-c), and daring according to the Eleatic Stranger (258d), to af rm that there is ntvw t m n, and arguably the daring statement only proves acceptable to the latter because he has decided in the end that being and not-being are not true opposites. 6 Just how intimate the link is between these various kinds of logically abhorrent interaction between opposites is not a simple question to answer. But there is some reason to think that Plato would see the adverbial cases, F-ly un-F, as virtually interchangeable with the causal cases, un-F because of F. In the Protagoras (332b-c), at any rate, Socrates

argues for a straight equivalence between somethings being done F-ly and its being done out of F-ness (causal dative), for instance that what is done foolishly is what is done out of folly. So the puzzlement over slowly quick and the like may even be reducible to puzzlement over the causal version, quick because of slowness. Alternatively, and more plausibly, both may be reducible to puzzlement as to how quickness could be in any way characterised by slowness. I am very far from pretending to understand what is going on in these and similar passages. But I am con dent (a) that the pattern of reasoning I have documented is far too deep-seated in Platos thought to be explained away either as humorous or as his idiosyncratic way of expressing some harmless truth, and (b) that we will never fully understand Platos logic and metaphysics until we do understand what is driving him here. Some of the examples I have listed, such as those at Protagoras 355d, Parmenides 131c-d and Theaetetus 199d, provide the basis of crucial refutations within Platonic arguments, and it is a pity that modern commentators have failed to recognise that this strange but ubiquitous Platonic causal principle is at work in them. As a step towards understanding why Plato is so ercely attached to the principle that opposites cannot cause opposites, the most that I can hope to achieve in this paper is an improved grasp of its positive counterpart, the principle that what causes F must itself be F. First we must take a glance at the kind of causes that Socrates considers acceptable, and the kind he considers spurious, in the autobiographical passage of the Phaedo . The following chart lists the main examples he discusses there, adding in square brackets a number of guesses as to how he might complete the picture. (For the laws cited here, see p. 121)
Causation at Phd. 96a-101c (+ 105b-c) ( rst voyage) (second voyage) (105b-c) intelligent cause safe cause subtle cause [part of providentially designed life cycle?] ? [largeness]

effect

spurious cause

objection [these also bring about shrinkage e.g. of the food?] head also results in smallness (Law 3), and is itself small (Law 1) (100c8101b2)

(a) a human beeating, or adding ings growth esh to esh (= becoming (96c7-d5) large) (96c6-7) (b) being large [in relation to another adult] (96d8-e1) a head (96e1)

Why then does he implicitly allow the same to be characterised by different (Sph. 255e)? Perhaps he does not consider same and different to be opposites: at least, I know of no evidence that he does. At Tim. 35a7-8 they are hard to mix but can be combined by force.
6

largeness (101a1-5)

the largeness in us

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(cont. Causation at Phd. 96a-101c (+ 105b-c) ) ( rst voyage) (second voyage) (105b-c) intelligent cause safe cause subtle cause ? numerousness (101b4-6) twoness (101c2-7)

effect

spurious cause

objection

(c) 10 being more than 8 (96e1-3) (d) 1 becoming 2 (96e7-9, 97a5-7)

2 (96e2-3) addition (97a1) or division (97a7)

[2 also makes 8 less (Law 3)] theyd be opposite causes of the same effect (Law 2) (97a7-b3) [these could result in any shape/arrangement? (Law 3)] [aether could just as easily produce the opposite motions (Law 3)] [a vortex also brings about motion; air also lets things fall (Law 3)] bones and sinews are just as effective for running away (Law 3) (98e5-99a4) [these things can have the opposite effect, e.g. in a corpse (Law 3)]

as effective at making it cold in winter. An intelligent cause, if we could nd one to place in column 4, would be cosmic nous , which orders everything, including summer heat, for the best. Next, the safe cause would be, quite simply hotness. And if nally a subtle cause were to be sought, it would have to be the re travelling from the sun, which is inalienably hot and therefore necessarily brings heat with it. As has often been remarked, at least the following three Laws of Causation are being assumed by Plato: If x causes anything to be F (whose opposite is un-F) (1) x must not be un-F (2) xs opposite must not cause anything to be F (3) x must never cause anything to be un-F Plato, I have argued, regards as the cause of a given effect whatever thing in the story it is most appropriate to attach the blame to. How does Plato decide which item quali es for this? Commentators have often enough succumbed to the temptation to frame their answer in terms of necessary or suf cient conditions, but it seems to me that this cannot do justice to Platos approach. Socrates having bones and sinews is said to be a necessary condition of his sitting in prison, but explicitly not the cause. Conversely, Socrates decision that it is best to stay and face the death penalty is explicitly the cause of his sitting in prison, but cannot be a suf cient condition of his doing so or his bones and sinews could not be said, as they are, to constitute a further necessary condition. These considerations at least show that Platonic causes are not straightforwardly identi able with either necessary or suf cient conditions. But there is a far more fundamental consideration to add, one which shows that they cannot be conditions at all. If causes are essentially things , and these include simple things like the beautiful and intelligence (as distinct from states of affairs, events etc.), talk of necessary or suf cient conditions becomes unsatisfactory, since no causal theory could coherently describe such a thing, as distinct from some fact about the thing like its presence on the scene, as constituting any kind of condition. Your stabbing me through the heart may be a suf cient condition of my death, but it is hard to see what it would even mean to call you a suf cient condition of my death. Alternatively, it may be and often is suspected that explanation 7 is
The equation of aitiai with explanations has become almost as popular in the interpretation of Plato as in that of Aristotle. It represents one of my very few disagreements with Julia Annas, Aristotle on inef cient causes, PQ 32 (1982), 311-26.
7

(e) shape and position of the earth (97d5-98a2) (f ) celestial motions (96b9, 98a2-b2)

air, aether, water (Anaxagoras) (98c1) aether (Anaxagoras) (98c1)

to give it stability (108e-109a) cf. (g) [to communicate number etc.? (Timaeus 39b, 46e-47c, 90c-d)] part of the overall good cosmic arrangement (99c5-6)

(g) the earths stability (99b6-8)

a vortex (Empedocles) or a cushion of air (Anaxagoras) (99b6-8) bones and sinews (98c4-d6)

[rest?]

(h) Socrates sitting in prison (98c2-4)

the Athenians [sitting?] and Socrates judgements about what is best (98e1-5) wisdom ( phronesis ) is intrinsically good (69a-b) ? soul

(i) thought/ wisdom blood (Empe( phronein ) docles), air (96b3ff.) (Anaximines), re (Heraclitus), brain (Alcmaeon?) (96b3ff.) (j) a things being beautiful (100c10-d1) its colour, or shape (100d1-3)

[same colour/ shape can make a thing ugly (Law 3)]

[by (human or the beautiful divine) design] (100d3-e3)

To illustrate the full range of this scheme, let me invent an example. Imagine in column 1 the question What is the cause of its being hot in summer? A spurious cause (column 2) might be given by the astronomers answer The suns movement in the ecliptic, to which the objection (in column 3) would perhaps be that that same alleged cause is just

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the dominant notion motivating Plato that he is requiring a description under which the cause in question will prove maximally explanatory of its effect, in the way that to adapt an example from Aristotle it is more explanatory (though it may be no truer) to call the person responsible for my house a builder than an amateur trombonist. But that this kind of explanatoriness is not what he is seeking seems clear to me. In no case does Socrates replace a rejected cause, such as the bones and sinews rejected as the cause of his sitting, with a redescription of the same item. Rather, he each time substitutes a reference to a quite different item, in this case Socrates judgement about what is best. Socrates anyway assumes that a satisfactory cause must be able to survive such redescription, at least in the following case: he excludes a head as the cause of someones largeness on the ground that, a head being something small, this causal account would entail something smalls being the cause of largeness (101a-b). It seems, then, that causal contexts are referentially transparent, and the aim of causal inquiry is to identify the thing responsible, no matter under what description. Of course it can hardly be denied that nding the cause of something may often play a crucial part in explaining it. My warning is against taking Platonic causes to have a primarily epistemological function of the kind outlined above. If I am right, they constitute less an epistemological than an ontological category. Platos approach is to sift through the items that play a part in the story, and to ask which among them has some characteristic which made it all along such as to bring about the effect in question. Bones and sinews (see (h) in the chart) were clearly not all along such as to bring about the effect of sitting in prison, because they are just as suited to the (presumably) opposite activity of running away from prison (98e5-99a4). A cushion of air (see (g) in the chart) is, likewise, not such as to bring about the effect of the earths stability (as Anaxagoras and others thought), because, we may take Socrates to mean, there is nothing about air as such to make it more suitable for holding things up than for doing the opposite, letting them fall. These are applications of Law 3. Similarly (see (d) in the chart), on Law 2, if I am holding one piece of wood and pick up another, addition cannot be named as the cause of my now holding two pieces of wood in my hand. Addition may have led to
Cf. also Vlastos, art. cit. A more nuanced account is offered by Gail Fine, Forms as causes: Plato and Aristotle, in A. Graeser (ed.), Mathematics and Metaphysics in Aristotle (Bern and Stuttgart 1987), 69-112, who brings out ways in which cause and explanation may overlap.

the doubling on this occasion, but it does not follow that it is its nature to produce 2, when its (supposed) opposite, division, is just as effective at producing the same result: I could simply have broken the rst piece of wood in two. That is, re ection about its opposite reveals that there cannot be anything about addition as such that links it to the effect in question. If, then, Plato is looking for something which was all along such as to produce the effect F-ness, it may be hard for him to see what it could ever be about the thing that pointed towards that outcome, if not the things being itself in its own nature F. At least, it is not hard to illustrate such a principle, provided that you select your examples carefully. To take Platos own paradigmatic case from later on in the Phaedo , re by its presence can only make things hot, never cold, because it is itself by nature hot. Likewise snow, being by nature cold, can by its presence only make things cold, and the number three, by being present in a set of things, can only make them odd because it is itself inalienably odd. These look like good illustrations of Platos Law 1, that whatever causes something to be F must not itself be un-F, and, equally, of its positive counterpart, the principle that like causes like.8 It is tempting to react with counterexamples. 9 Must the cause of someones death be itself dead? Will a court convict you of my murder only if you were yourself dead at the time I died? Obviously not, but a Platonic theory of causation might still survive the challenge, so long as it speci es carefully exactly what item is causing what. The jury, in deciding that you are guilty (atiow) of my death, may strictly speaking mean that you are a murderous person who can therefore be held responsible for, or the cause of, the murderous act a causal analysis which does appear to obey Platonic principles. As for my death itself, well, perhaps the murderous act is not strictly its cause. Perhaps it has no cause at all, beyond a safe formal cause, the onset of death and the concurrent departure of the soul, taking life with it. This approach is sometimes known as the transmission theory of causation. In a case like that of heat the name makes easy sense: you can be made hot only by a hot thing, because nothing else has heat to transmit to you. The same might be said of a very different application of the

8 For an impressive defence of this principle, see S. Makin, An ancient principle about causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1990-1), 135-52. 9 This type of reaction is well articulated by D. Bostock, Platos Phaedo (Oxford 1986), p. 155.

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same law, when in the Meno Socrates apologises for his numbing effect on his interlocutor by remarking It is because I myself above all am at a loss that I cause others too to be at a loss.10 It is easy to think of Socratic dialectic as the device by which he transmits his puzzlement to others. Even in the simple case where a murderous act is attributable to a murderous person, while there is no use for a causal stage in which the murderousness is transmitted from the agent to the act, as if the act were already there awaiting the conferment of this property, we might still say, more loosely, that decision-making is the process by which you transmit your character to your behaviour. But we must be careful. To insist too strongly on transmission as a distinct stage in the causal process threatens to dilute the immediacy and transparency of the cause-effect relation. When we have accounted for the murderous act by pointing to the murderous person, we have already said all that there is to say about where the actual responsibility lies. That is why, as we saw earlier, Plato does not include in the irreducible kernel of a causal statement the process by which the cause acts. How the murderousness was transmitted is no more important to a causal account than it was at Phaedo 100d3-e3 to establish whether it is by sharing, presence or whatever that the Beautiful comes to make things beautiful. There is nothing altogether absurd in the prospect of learning to reform our causal language so as obey Platos strictures. And if he can persuade us that all genuine causal relations have this transparency and immediacy, why should we object? It may even help us to see why, in cases of accidental killing, we should not hold the unfortunate perpetrator responsible at all: there is simply no properly causal link between the agents character and the act, in the way that there is when someone elses murderous character becomes the cause of a murderous act. An apparent further attraction of adhering to so strict a notion of cause is the prospect of circumventing the danger, highlighted by Hume, that so-called causal relations will prove to be nothing more than regular conjunctions. One central thrust of Platos account is that reference to mere situational correlations, like that of air and aether with the earths original formation, or that of Socrates bones and sinews with his sitting, is a hopelessly inadequate way of locating a cause-effect relation. In all such cases, the actual causality cannot be displayed, and we are being asked simply to take it on trust. Only in causal relations of the kind which Plato
10

endorses is the actual nature of the causing conceptually self-evident. Quite apart from the Humean question, a Platonic approach promises to save us from the sheer arbitrariness or subjectivity which the task of singling out a cause regularly seems to import. What caused my death? Was it you? Was it your action? Was it your gun, or your ring your gun? Or was it the rupture of my heart, as a forensic scientist is more likely to claim? Or again, was it reckless provocation on my part, your deprived childhood, your callous pursuit of your own ends, the in uence of television, or any of a thousand other items which various sectional interests may choose to privilege as the cause? Platonic causation eliminates all these impostors at a stroke.11 It is inadequate, then, to object on the ground that Platos causal theory cannot account for all the relations which we consider causal. Maybe, after all, they are not genuinely causal. But can it, at least, deal adequately with all the cases that he himself considers causal? What about Socrates own expressed ideal of teleological causation? In the passage about the causes of his sitting in prison, he is rejecting material causes in favour of intelligent, goal-directed causes: the primary reason for his sitting in prison is his judgement that it is better for him not to escape. He adds that he would dearly love to learn how to establish similar causes for the arrangement of the cosmos, showing how a divine Intelligence (nous ) ordered it as it is because it judged that this was the best way for things to be. Since Socrates confesses that he has been unable to discover an adequate account of such causes, we should not expect, from his own informal sketch of the idea, to learn much about how they might be coherently formulated. Plato is acknowledging that cosmology was not a discipline to which his master made any direct contribution. But it is equally clear that Plato himself12 regards teleological cosmology as a proper philosophical project. How, then, does he himself envisage this kind of cause? How, in particular, can intelligent or teleological causes even obey Platos own austere causal principles? For example, if Intelligence is the cause of
11 I am grateful to Christopher Shields for impressing on me the point made in this paragraph. 12 In Teleology and myth in the Phaedo, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 5 (1990), 359-83, and The dramatis personae of Platos Phaedo, in T.J. Smiley (ed.), Philosophical Dialogues: Plato, Hume and Wittgenstein (Oxford 1995), 1-26, I have argued that to understand the Phaedos teleological programme we must distinguish Platos own authorial voice from the voice of his character Socrates.

Meno 80c9-d1, pantw m llon atw

porn otvw ka tow

llouw poi

poren.

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everything, then isnt it (in de ance of Causal Law 3) the cause of opposite effects both heat in summer and cold in winter, both light in the day and darkness at night? I dont think so. If Plato wants Intelligence to be the cause of all things, that will mean all good things. Intelligence is intrinsically good, therefore in so far as it acts upon things it can only make them good. As Socrates emphasises (98a-b), to attribute something to the agency of an intelligence just is to say why it is best that it should be the way it is. This is in fact a causal thesis almost explicitly maintained in book II of the Republic (379b-c), where Socrates argues that, since god is intrinsically good, he is the cause, not of everything, but only of good things. Intelligence invariably aims for the good, and is therefore causally ef cacious only when it succeeds in bringing about a good state of affairs. (If it is wondered why Intelligence should be absolved of being the cause of its own omissions, failures or mistakes, Platos causal principles again step in with the answer. Intelligence, being good and essentially aiming for the good, is simply not causally correlated in the right way to a bad outcome. This is little more than a development, on a cosmic scale, of the Socratic paradox that no one does wrong willingly, because intelligence always aims for the good and therefore never intends its bad results.) 13 Thus Platos teleological project is one of investigating, not everything about the world, but its goodness. However, the goodness which affects it has enormous causal powers. For example (see (g) in the chart), Socrates says at 99b-c, it is absurd of the natural philosophers to attribute the earths stable position in the cosmos to its resting on, say, a cushion of air, as if air could compete with the power of the good and the binding in holding the whole arrangement together. He means, I think, that the good has this power in virtue of being the goal governing all the activities of the divine Intelligence. It is precisely because it is good for the earth to be stable that the divine Intelligence can be relied on to nd a way to make it so. Platonic teleology, then, can be read as fully adhering to the strict Platonic notion of a cause. Teleological causation is from start to nish a matter of the good bringing about the good. It is, in short, a special appli13 The teleological explanation of Socrates sitting in prison is (98e) that since (a) it has seemed better to the Athenians to condemn me, for this reason (b) it has seemed to me too in my turn better to sit here, and more just to stay and face whatever penalty they impose. Here we might I suppose take it that the bad situation (a) is a failure of intelligence (this time human intelligence), the morally good act (b) a success of intelligence, in achieving the good that it invariably aims for.

cation of the formal causation to which Socrates turns in his famous Second Voyage (Phd. 99c-102a), with its safe causal story that it is the F which causes F things to be F. What it may be thought to anticipate in addition is subtle causation of the kind canvassed at 105b-c: intelligence, being intrinsically good, always imports goodness by its presence, just as re, being intrinsically hot, always by its presence makes things hot. II. Formal causes Platos formal causes have received a largely bad press. If you want to know what makes a sunset beautiful, it may seem quite unhelpful to be told Because of the beautiful. Can these formal causes be other than vacuous? They can. There is an enormous value in knowing that the sunset is beautiful because of the beautiful and not because of, say, its colour. Only when you know what the genuine cause is do you know what it is that you have to investigate. If you want to understand what makes sunsets beautiful, dont be sidetracked into investigating the nature of colours. Investigate what the beautiful is in other words, seek to establish the essence of the beautiful by means of a de nition. Likewise, more ambitiously, if you want to understand the worlds goodness, forget about air, aether and the like and nd out what goodness is. You will then be able to trace a causal chain from the nature of the Good, through the inherent goodness of the divine intellect, down to the goodness of the worlds individual features. But only someone who grasped the Platonic causal principles could hope to carry this out. One di f culty about envisaging this intellectual process is that the Phaedo itself does not explicitly supply working de nitions for any of the Forms that it considers, and this has sometimes fostered the impression that there is nothing more to formal causal analysis than the utterly trivial undertaking of naming the formal cause: This is F because of F-ness. However, not only does Socrates indicate, if cryptically, at 101d that the Form that has been posited will eventually need to be de ned, but I am also convinced that there is at any rate one simple trio of interdependent Forms, central to his illustrations of formal causation, whose de nitions Plato assumes all his readers already to know. This is the trio large-equalsmall.14 At 74b Simmias unhesitatingly agrees that we, i.e. at the very
14

For these as a trio, cf. 75c9, t son ka t mezon ka t latton And in the

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least all those present, know what the equal itself is.15 And when we get to the account of immanent largeness and smallness at 102a-103a, Socrates sounds as if he is in fact assuming as known the de nitions of largeness and smallness later used at Parmenides 150c-d (and perhaps implicit at Hp.Ma. 294b). Largeness is the capacity to exceed (dnamiw to perxein), smallness the capacity to be exceeded (dnamiw to perxesyai ); in which case, equality must presumably be the capacity neither to exceed nor be exceeded. It is, I suspect, because largeness is a Form which we are all expected to know 16 that Plato repeatedly invokes it to illustrate formal causation. This is true not only in the Phaedo , but also, as I shall now argue, in that classic passage of the Parmenides , the Third Man Argument (132a-b).
I think it is for the following sort of reason that you believe each Form is one thing. When it seems to you that there are many particular large things, perhaps it seems to you, as you look onto them all, that there is one Form, the same one, and for this reason you judge the Large to be one. What you say is true, replied Socrates. But what about the Large itself and the other large things? If you look onto them all in the same way with your soul, wont a single Large appear again, because of which () all these appear large? Apparently. In that case another Form of Largeness will put in an appearance, generated over and above Largeness itself and the things which participate in it. And in addition to all of these again a further one, because of which () all of them will be large. And you will no longer have each of the Forms as single, but as in nite in number.

set of F things. But, given also that the Form F-ness is itself taken to be F Beauty is beautiful, for example positing this Form merely adds one further F thing to the list, thus generating a new, expanded set of F things, for which we will have to posit a further Form, F-ness 1. And the same reasoning will generate a yet further Form, F-ness 2. And so on ad in nitum. Gregory Vlastos17 set the terms for modern discusssions of the Third Man Argument (TMA) by isolating two controversial premises. Stripped down, these are: Self-predication (SP): F-ness is F Non-identity (NI): None of the F things is identical with F-ness Since it has proved hard if not impossible to absolve Plato of being somehow committed to SP,18 and since NI (even when heavily disguised) looks like a direct negation of SP, there must remain a doubt about whether we have really understood NI. My hope is to show that, provided we keep in sight Platos notion of formal causation, a highly plausible understanding of NI can be found. It may be helpful to start from a retrospective view of the TMA. Immediately following it, Socrates retreats to the proposal that Forms are thoughts located exclusively in our souls (132b). He expresses his con dence and is not challenged on the point by Parmenides that if Forms were thoughts the Third Man regress would be avoided. Why so? If Largeness is a thought (call it conceptual Largeness), it is nonidentical with the particular largenesses over which it stands. Then what links these particular largenesses and conceptual Largeness itself? Why wont there be a new thought, conceptual Largeness 1, which links this new set of largenesses? On the reasonable assumption that no thought can include itself within its own scope, the thought which is generated by surveying a set of things which include conceptual Largeness could not itself be conceptual Largeness. And then we would be confronted with the TMA all over again. Clearly then we must construe either the TMA or the Form-thought equivalence so as to make the latter less vulnerable to the regress attack.
17 Originally in G. Vlastos, The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides, Philosophical Review 63 (1954), 319-49, repr. in R.E. Allen (ed.), Studies in Platos Metaphysics (London 1965). 18 As Dorothea Frede points out in The nal proof of the immortality of the soul in Platos Phaedo 102a-107a, Phronesis 23 (1978), 24-41, SP even follows directly from the doctrine that Forms are causes combined with the causal principle that what makes things F must itself be F.

To oversimply somewhat, Parmenides argument runs as follows. A Form is supposed to be that entity in virtue of which a set of things share a property: all F things are F in virtue of the single Form, F-ness. This is sometimes called the One-over-Many principle. To say that Forms are separate entails that this Form, F-ness, is something over and above the

Phaedo larger and large are interchangeable cf. 102d-103a for reasons which the de nition of large (see immediately below) will make obvious. 15 I therefore agree with Dominic Scott, Recollection and Experience (Cambridge 1995), 67-8, that the later indication (76b-c) that perhaps no one but Socrates knows the Forms re ects the fact that they are by now talking about the entire range of Forms, including the problematic goodness, beauty etc. 16 That largeness is one of the easy Forms (by contrast with goodness, beauty etc.) is con rmed by Meno 72c-e, where, by contrast with the case of goodness ( ret), it is a matter of common agreement that one and the same largeness makes all large things large.

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I suggest that this requires the following approach. In the TMA, Parmenides generates his second form of Largeness by urging upon Socrates that he (Socrates) looks with his soul onto the Form plus the particulars that fall under it and notices what common Form links them all. That is why Socrates, in the Form-thought passage, responds by explicitly placing the Form itself within the soul. There it cannot be looked onto by the soul in the way that the other large things can, and no second Form will be generated. The One over Many principle was designed to correlate a set of objective items accessed by the mind; if the Form proves instead to be subjective, it will cease to be one of the items taken in by the survey. We can now see why Plato, in anticipation of this later response, made Parmenides start out in the TMA by emphasising the objective, extramental status of Forms. And what better way to substantiate this than by bringing out their objective role as causes : the Form Largeness is actually what makes large things large. That is a role which it could scarcely perform if it were a mere human thought. That the Form has this causal function is in fact explicitly brought out twice in the TMA by the causal dative, which should be familiar to readers of the Phaedo as one of Platos standard locutions for a cause, and as the standard locution for a formal cause (as in t kal pnta t kal kal, Phd. 100e, etc.). Indeed, the same causal dative has featured in Parmenides immediately preceding argument, on the absurdity of making something relatively small viz. a part of Largeness or Equality the cause of a particular things being large or equal (131c-d, cf. above p. 000 ). It will make a huge difference if we start by noticing this simple terminological point. 19 According to the TMA, the discovery of a Form, Largeness, leads to the addition of Largeness 1, because of which () Largeness and the other large things are large; and that in turn likewise leads to the addition of Largeness 2, because of which Largeness 1 and the other large things are large.

The attraction of this reading is, I hope, that it offers an immediately plausible interpretation of the TMA. If we pay proper attention to the causal language, we will be well placed to explain how the regress is generated. We still need versions of SP and NI in order to follow the argument. However, SP, the puzzling assumption that e.g. Largeness is large, can for the purposes of the argument be treated as meaning no more than that Largeness, the Form, is itself a largeness, 20 albeit a rather special one. The whole argument can, for our present convenience, be read as one about the interrelations of a series of largenesses, or cases of largeness, starting with the individual largenesses (i.e. individual capacities to exceed) of a set of particular objects. My present aim is not to solve the problem of Self-Predication, but temporarily to disarm it in order to concentrate instead on the dangers posed by Non-Identity, to which I now turn. With the help of the causal analysis, we are in a position to rewrite NI as a new,21 but also I hope entirely credible, premise: NI*: No cause is identical with its own effect NI* has many merits. It seems an obvious intuitive truth. It is explicitly stated (with regard to the causes of becoming) as a law at Philebus 27a and Hippias Major 297c1-2. Above all, it is arguably a principle which Plato had already acknowledged with regard to the causal role of Forms: at Phaedo 100c he was presumably recognising that F-ness could not be the cause of its own F-ness when he wrote: If anything is beautiful, other than the Beautiful itself, it is beautiful through no other cause than that it participates in that Beautiful.22 The argument can now run as follows. Take, for convenience, a set of three large things, plus Largeness itself, which stands over them. You now have four largenesses the largenesses of the three large things, and Largeness itself. That these are four of a kind, and therefore in need of a
20 Cf. Phd. 102d-e, where our individual capacity to exceed may be called interchangeably the large in us and the largeness in us. 21 The NI premise, thus formulated, has much in common with the version offered by Gail Fine, On Ideas (Oxford 1993), p. 206, Nothing is F in virtue of itself . What I am proposing to add is the speci cally causal analysis. 22 Technically he could mean that it is the cause of its own beauty, although not by being participated in by itself; but as I remarked in Part I, in the immediate sequel he asserts that the nature of this participation relation is unimportant to his causal thesis, which he simpli es so as to omit it: It is because of the beautiful that beautiful things are beautiful.

19 The terminological point has been overlooked by the classic literature on the TMA. However, since I rst wrote the above, the same point has been made by K.-C. Chang in his 1995 Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation, The role of the Timaeus in the development of Platos theory of Forms, and by Mary-Louise Gill in M.L. Gill and P. Ryan (ed. and trans.), Plato, Parmenides (Indianapolis and Cambridge 1996), pp. 34-6. I have also learned that a similar point was developed at some length by Alexander Nehamas in his 1971 Princeton doctoral dissertation, Predication and the theory of forms in the Phaedo, which, however, I have not seen. For a comparably causal reading of the Likeness regress in the Parmenides, cf. S. Waterlow, The Third Mans contribution to Platos paradigmatism, Mind 91 (1982), 339-57.

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unitary causal account, is con rmed by the fact that they all satisfy the same de nition which is probably, as we have seen, the capacity to exceed. So what causes them all to be largenesses? Not Largeness itself, since then it would be causing not only other largenesses but also itself, in contravention of NI*. There is therefore a fth Largeness which makes the rst four largenesses largenesses. But this new Largeness satis es the same de nition as the other four largenesses, yielding a set of ve largenesses, for which a yet further cause must be sought. And so on ad in nitum. Looking back on the structure of the argument, we may note that no version of NI was, or in the context needed to be, invoked as justifying the initial separation of Largeness from individual largenesses: that Forms are separate from the things that participate in them was Socrates hypothesis, already for some time under active investigation by Parmenides. But as soon as Parmenides came to the second step, and needed an argument for the separation of Largeness 1, it was the causal principle NI* that he reached for. This might lead us to re ect that NI*, the separation of cause from effect, would in fact constitute an equally powerful ground for the original Platonic separation of the Form Largeness from its effects, such individual largenesses as yours and mine. Even before he separated the Forms as transcendent entities, Plato was already speaking of them as the causes of their own instantiations (e.g. Euthyphro 6d-e, Meno 72c). Perhaps then NI* should be added to the motives which we standardly adduce for that single most revolutionary development in Platos metaphysics, his postulation of separated Forms.23 Christs College, Cambridge

23 At the very least, NI* yields Forms which are non-identical with their instances. How Plato gets from this to independently existing Forms (which I take to be intended by the notion of separation), is a problematic issue (cf. G. Fine, Separation, OSAP 2 (1984), 31-87). But NI* would do much to bridge that gap, because causes are naturally held to be not merely non-identical with their effects but also temporally and/or ontologically prior to them. My thanks for comments on previous drafts supplied by audiences at Geneva, Lille, Cambridge, Princeton, Milan, Columbia, Cornell, London and Shef eld, and to Christopher Shields, Verity Harte, Gail Fine, Barrie Fleet, Robert Wardy, Voula Tsouna and Chris Bobonich for further written comments.