ABSTRACT
I AM very much indebted to Professor Vlastos for helping me to interpret the Third Man Argument (TMA)—indebted both to his recent article in The Philosophical Review (see above, Ch. XII), and to his elucidations in private correspondence. On two main points we are in complete agreement. First, the TMA is read by us both as ‘the record of honest perplexity’. Plato is not making a merely hypothetical use of an assumption ‘p’ in order to infer ‘not p’, which would be a straightforward reductio ad absurdum; he begins by asserting ‘p’, and then states an argument with ‘not p’ as its conclusion—and this argument, if valid, reveals a hidden inconsistency in the premisses, one never tracked down or formulated by Plato himself. Second, we both hold that one of Plato's tacit assumptions is Self-Prediction—that for him a term ‘F’ applies not only to ‘the many’ Fs but also to the Form that makes them Fs. I shall allege some evidence for Self-Prediction later; if anything, I take it more seriously than Vlastos does.
