MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFFsee the studies by Frede cited above, as well as Constance Meinwald, “Pro-
metheus’s Bounds: Peras and Apeiron in Plato’s Philebus,” in Method in Ancient Phi-
losophy, ed. Jyl Gentzler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 165– 80; and Gisela Striker,
Peras und Apeiron: Das Problem der Formen in Platons Philebos (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck and Ruprecht, 1970).
- There is a strong Pythagorean infl uence on Plato’s understanding of
limit and the unlimited. However, while the Pythagoreans leave such pairs
contrasted in their Table of Opposites (one/many, odd/even, right/left, male/
female), Plato seeks to overcome such dichotomies through the intermediary.
As Cynthia Hampton writes, the divine method of the Philebus “provides a non-
dualistic model for how ultimate reality is related to sensibles,” one of interest to
feminist readers who seek to challenge the gender bias typically found in pairs
of opposites (“Overcoming Dualism,” 225). Hampton reminds us that in the
Symposium Plato has Diotima teach the lesson of the intermediate, and that it is
not accidental that she is a woman (“Overcoming Dualism,” 223– 24). - Frede translates this as “a coming-into-being”; Benardete, as “genesis
into being”; Crombie, as “process leading to stability”(Examination of Plato’s Doc-
trines, 2:432); Gadamer, as “Werden zum Sein” (Dialectical Ethics, 138). - Günter Figal, “The Idea and Mixture of the Good,” in Retracing the Pla-
tonic Text, ed. John Russon and John Sallis (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2000), 85– 95. - For the other places Plato repeats this proverb on repetition, see Ben-
ardete (Tragedy and Comedy of Life, 75). Plato’s word ejpanapolei`n (Philebus 60a),
“to repeat yet again,” invites comparison with the related word ajnapolhvsh, “to
turn up the ground again, repeat, revise, reconsider” (Philebus 34c). See also
the word ejpanalambavnwn, “to take up again, resume, repeat,” at Gorgias 488b,
Phaedrus 228a, and Theaetetus 169e. - As Guthrie summarizes, “The crude question: ‘Is pleasure good or
bad?’ is unreal until one has answered the further questions: ‘What sort of
pleasure?’ and ‘Pleasure in what?’ ” (History of Greek Philosophy, 200). - The movement from “a clear-cut either-or” to a balance of the two sides
“makes human practice the theme,” as Gadamer explains (Idea of the Good, 30). - Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Stud-
ies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1980), 155. - Smith, “(De)construction of Irrefutable Argument,” 216.
- This last point reveals a movement in the dialogues traditionally re-
garded as late. Crombie explains this shift as one in which “genesis or becom-
ing can develop into ousia or being,” and the transient can become stable and
permanent (Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, 2:422). Guthrie also concludes that
while the difference still holds, in the “late” dialogues “it seems to be a question
less of contrasting Being with Becoming than of distinguishing grades of Be-
ing” (History of Greek Philosophy, 232). - Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works
of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).