ABSTRACT
Plato’s “middle dialogues,” especially the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium and Phaedrus, along with the late Timaeus, bring the reader’s attention to a previously unnoticed sort of thing that he calls “forms”. Plato affirms separateness directly or symbolically in numerous passages, and “Parmenides” emphasizes it repeatedly in his critique of Young Socrates’ theory. All of Plato’s many arguments and motivations for postulating forms are of great interest, and have stimulated variants and adaptations for 2,500 years. Separateness and independence do not strictly entail one another, and in fact Plato argues for both via a single, normative, argument. Plato’s view appears as that the ultimate grounds for believing in eternal, immutable, intelligible entities that are what they are separately and independently of spatial and temporal things, and that are the source of all that exists and all that is of value in the universe, are normative.
