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Forms and Structure in Plato’s
Metaphysics
Forms and Structure in
Plato’s Metaphysics
A N NA M A R M O D O R O
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197577158.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. Anaxagoras’s metaphysical foundations 12
1.1. Introduction 12
1.2. What there is 13
1.3. Opposite properties and their causal efficacy 19
1.4. Like causes like 27
1.5. Gunky Opposites 29
1.5.1. The Opposites exist as unlimitedly divided into parts 29
1.5.2. The Opposites are homoeomers 32
1.6. Closing remarks 34
2. Making things up 35
2.1. Introduction 35
2.2. Presence and preponderance of Opposites 38
2.3. A bundle theory of objects 43
2.4. Seeds of structure 45
2.5. The world is one 47
2.6. The role of nous 53
2.7. Closing remarks 59
Appendix: What are Plato and Aristotle complaining about? 61
3. Plato’s Forms as powers 65
3.1. Introduction 65
3.2. The Eleatic Principle 66
3.3. The Forms as causes 72
3.4. Transcendent powers 77
3.5. Closing remarks 81
4. Forms in objects 83
4.1. Introduction 83
4.2. Being present in versus belonging to an object 84
4.3. Presence or communion? 86
vi Contents
Bibliography 207
Index Locorum 217
Index 219
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the editor Peter Ohlin for his unfailing encour-
agement, and to the Press’s anonymous readers for raising the bar
high with their comments on the manuscript. It has been a pleasure to
work with Oxford University Press through the process that led to this
book’s publication. I also thank here the audiences near and far who
provided feedback on talks based on the manuscript, at conferences,
departmental seminars, and other various occasions, internationally.
I gave graduate courses based on earlier versions of the manuscript
at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, while I was a vis-
iting professor there between 2018 and 2020; I thank the students there
collectively, for teaching them was helpful in thinking through my ar-
guments. I am grateful also to Rich Neels, who read and offered com-
ments on a late version of the manuscript; and to Udit Bery and Chiara
Martini, who were writing with contagious gusto their BPhil theses
under my supervision in Oxford in the Spring of 2018, when I started
working on this book project.
This book is dedicated to my Mum and Dad, whom I thank for their
heuristically divergent philosophies of life.
Introduction
1 Chapters 1 and 2 of this book draw substantially, and in certain sections verbatim, on
Marmodoro (2017b), although there is also new material on Anaxagoras here presented.
It is part of my overarching argument here that Plato develops his own metaphysics in
(critical) engagement with that of Anaxagoras. It is therefore essential to present to the
reader a detailed account of Anaxagoras’s views (as I interpret them) where relevant to
those of Plato examined here; for this reason, I make such account here available, even if
some readers might be already familiar with it.
2 Although the issue of the relation between Plato’s and Anaxagoras’s metaphys-
ical systems has been hardly investigated in modern scholarship, there are some not-
able exceptions. Among the most recent literature, a helpful point of reference is Mann
(2000). Mann’s work is helpful not only because of the ‘comparative’ approach it takes to
Anaxagoras’s, Plato’s, and Aristotle’s systems, and the discussion of philosophical issues
that span these three systems, but also, specifically, because it provides references to an-
cient sources who saw philosophical connections between Anaxagoras and Plato, and
to the modern literature, up to the very late 1990s (in Mann 2000: 118, ft. 75). Among
modern studies, Denyer (1983) also deserves a special mention as a milestone in the de-
bate concerning Anaxagoras’s influence on Plato.
Forms and Structure in Plato’s Metaphysics. Anna Marmodoro, Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197577158.003.0001
2 Introduction
has of them, by analogy to how Plato’s Forms are standardly capitalized to capture their
unique features and distinguish them from Aristotle’s forms.
4 Because of other assumptions of Anaxagoras, we will see (in section 2.2 of chapter 2)
that only properties whose parts or shares are in preponderance in an object qualify the
object.
Introduction 3
5 The reader might find surprising, vis-à-vis my interpretative thesis, that Plato and
6 Nor did Aristotle, for reasons sketched in Marmodoro and Yates (2016: 3–7).
7 Plato uses different expressions to refer to this Form, which is a metaphysically sig-
nificant fact which we will examine in section 6.2.1 of c hapter 6.
6 Introduction
experiments’—one in the Sophist with the Great Kinds and one in the
Timaeus with the paradeigma—which are not fully worked out meta-
physical accounts, but pointers towards directions to explore further.
The transition from the Great Kinds to the paradeigma marks a
fresh metaphysical start for Plato. The fundamental ontology changes,
from being a system of separate individual Forms (before the Sophist);
via becoming a system in which Forms overlap in new and complex
ways with other Forms and with second-order Forms (in the Sophist);
to being a system wherein there is a single structured über-Form that
comprises all the Forms there are, the paradeigma. I argue that the so-
called paradeigma Plato introduces in the Timaeus is the ‘ontological
successor’ of the Great Kinds of the Sophist. But the Timaeus repre-
sents the starting point, not the end result, of Plato’s rebuilding of his
system—which he will never be able to complete. Notwithstanding its
unfinished status, the Timaeus account is incredibly rich in metaphys-
ical intuitions concerning how structure can do explanatory work in
an ontology with no relations.
In the final part of the book, I investigate why and how Plato moves
forward from the Anaxagorean position he has held throughout most
of his metaphysical development, with respect to the metaphysics of
participation. Before turning to that, a brief résumé of the overarching
argument as sketched thus far might be helpful to the reader.
My argument is that overlap is at the core of both Anaxagoras’s
and Plato’s systems, as a ‘mechanism’ that accounts for how a prop-
erty is distributed to its participants/the objects that are qualified by it.
For Anaxagoras, objects overlap constitutionally with properties; the
properties are physical entities, like the Hot or the Dry, whose parts
literally constitute objects. Plato is motivated to endorse Anaxagoras’s
model, because he finds it metaphysically explanatory—it provides an
intuitive ‘mechanism’ for property distribution, and facilitates a par-
simonious ontology, of Forms and sensible particulars (which, also,
partly overlap with each other.) In Plato’s system (pre-Timaeus) con-
stitutional overlap between objects and Forms accounts for the objects’
qualification, resemblance, for what we in modern metaphysics posit
as relations, and further, for necessity. Thus, constitutional overlap is
the fundamental metaphysical ‘tool’ for Plato, which he extends and
enriches in ways that yield a number of metaphysical breakthroughs, at
8 Introduction
imitation and the Demiurge’s operations can account for the objects’
possession of structure—e.g., an object comes to ‘resemble’ a triangle,
or is ‘crafted’ as a triangle. In chapter 7, I articulate the metaphysical
innovations that Plato introduces in the Timaeus, with respect to his
theory of Forms and participation in the Forms, with special focus
on the problem of structure; his (hitherto unacknowledged) solution
to the Third Man Argument; and the additional developments in his
metaphysics concerning how geometry and necessity enter the fabric
of nature and govern it.
The conclusion of the book is forward- looking. The pathway
from Anaxagoras’s metaphysics to Aristotle’s metaphysics, via
Plato’s, is through reconceiving structure from being a physical en-
tity (Anaxagoras’s seeds), to being a transcendent property (Plato’s
paradeigma), to being an abstract entity (Aristotle’s substantial forms).
Aristotle will learn two crucial metaphysical lessons from Plato: that
structure is an abstract entity, to be treated as a property (neither of
which Anaxagoras held); and that, nevertheless, objects do not become
qualified by part-taking of structure as if it were an ‘ordinary’ property.
How then do structures qualify objects? Aristotle needs to innovate
metaphysically, in his turn, and he does: for him, I argue, structure has
a double metaphysical role: it serves as subject of a substance’s proper-
ties, and as essence qualifying that substance; so, for example, Socrates
is essentially structured as a human being, and his structure, which or-
ganizes him as ‘human being’, is also the subject of Socrates’ properties.
This is the crux of Aristotle’s metaphysics of objects, and as such, it has
been greatly interesting as well as greatly challenging to scholars and
metaphysicians alike—and it remains vigorously debated today in the
current resurgence of ‘neo-Aristotelian’ metaphysics.10
Before concluding this introduction, now that the overarching
thesis of the book and its contents have been laid out, a note on the
10 I do not expand on Aristotle’s theory of substance in the book, to keep to its main
argument, but the reader who might want to learn more about the interpretation I argue
for in relation to Aristotle’s hylomorphism, might be interested in one or more of the set
of papers where I develop it, which include: Marmodoro (2013, 2020, and ‘Instantiation’,
unpublished manuscript).
10 Introduction
11 I am grateful to the Press’s anonymous readers for their helpful comments con-
cerning how to present the approach I take to Plato’s metaphysics; I borrowed their
words here.
12 By radically different I mean here different from how Plato’s metaphysics is trad-
itionally interpreted, but also different from any other metaphysical theory that has been
‘mapped out’ so far.
Introduction 11
2.
Vanha narri
Vaikeata oli nytkin päättää, tekikö hän pilaa vai oliko todellakin niin
liikutettu.
3.
Uskovaiset eukot