Méthode des hypothèses et usage cosmologique des Formes dans le Parménide de Platon

In the Parmenides, the logos is a matter of justification rather than definition. The Forms of which Socrates makes the hypothesis do not work only as conditions for the science of singular values. They are worth by their causal power with regard to the sensible variety. The hypothetical dialectic thus allows to guarantee the intelligibility of the cosmos. When the Hypothesis of Forms is then put to the test by Parmenides, the aporiae he draws from it are not enough to refute it; rather, they clear the boundaries of a correct interpretation. Nevertheless, these ideal units can only be preserved if, in turn, a superior principle justifies to suppose them. Only in this way, what was initially posited in the order of the possible will be revealed as a certain and necessary truth. Now, by practicing throughout the second part of the Dialogue, the mind will become capable of feeling the effectiveness of such a principle. For only the One, once liberated from pre-Socratic misunderstandings, can present himself to intuition as the “anhypothetic” which gives a definitive justification for the subaltern hypotheses. The successive hypotheses formulated by Parmenides bring an opportunity to recollect this absolute, as soon as they are overcome. A parallel reading of the Sophist suggests that the positive hypotheses, with their untenable conclusions, serve to denounce the ambiguities of Eleatic monism and to make us aware of its structural insufficiency: this version of the One, oscillating between the empty abstraction and the immanence in a dispersive matter, always lacks “dignity and power”, just as the Forms posed by Socrates. When this is recognized, the soul can experience the true transcendence.