ABSTRACT
This essay seeks to answer one question: what does the young Socrates learn about dialectic in Plato’s Parmenides? This question is usually not even asked in the literature since a developmentalist hypothesis that dates the Parmenides as a late dialogue is given precedence over Plato’s choice to make Socrates in this dialogue younger than he is in any other dialogue. If instead we take the older Socrates of other dialogues to have been already exercised in Parmenides’ “gymnastics,” answering the above question can greatly illumine the nature of dialectic in these dialogues. Specifically, dialectic appears as a response to the fact that forms appear in opposite ways in our wandering speech and one that yet makes insight into the forms possible.
