A mistake of Plato?

The article asserts the presence of an inaccuracy or mistake in the fragment of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, which deals with the one existing and non-existing in correlation with being and not-being. The author subjects this fragment, translated by N.N. Tomasov, to analysis and comes to the conclusion that the text confuses “being” and “not-being” in the distribution of these concepts in relation to the one non-existing and the one existing. At the same time, the one is treated as a philosophical category that logically rises above existence (in contrast to the eleatic one), uniting being and not-being, existing and non-existing, in the proclamation of which, according to the author, lies the main meaning of Parmenides. The confusion of being and not-being in the fragment in question contradicts this meaning and the general logic of the dialogue. The author further considers other translations of the analysed fragment, Russian (by F.A. Zlatoustovsky, V.N. Karpov and Yu.A. Shichalin) and foreign (English by B. Jowett, German by F. Susemihl, and French by А. Dies), as well as the original ancient Greek text. A common feature of these translations, which sets them apart from the one by Tomasov, is that the term “the one” is absent or feebly pronounced (the case of Jowett) notwithstanding its, asserted by the author, necessity in the logical structure of the fragment. Instead of the one (which is and which is not) they deal with being and not-being thus degrading a subject matter to a correlation between being and not-being in their inter-combinations, rather than a correlation between the one and being/not-being, necessary from the author’s point of view and present in Tomasov’s translation (what makes it the most accurate, in the author’s opinion, the mistake notwithstanding). Counter to linguistic issues, a conceptual nature of the subject is stressed. According to the result of the research, the author concludes that the cause of the mistake in the initial text analysed, as well as the discrepancies and ambiguities in the translations examined, is an inaccuracy or mistake in the original Parmenides. This inaccuracy or mistake, which is not completely identical with the initial mistake found in Tomasov’s translation, but which provoked it, consists in the use of the word “not-being” (εἶναι) instead of the word “being” (eivai) in the first part of the first sentence of the fragment. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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