Sunday, 08 November 2026

Major works meeting

• Continuing Metamorphoses
• Starting from 6.001
• Ending around 7.001
• Next week we’ll continue Metamorphoses book VII

Minor works meeting

• Starting Parmenides
• Starting from 126a
• Ending around 132a
• Next week we’ll continue Parmenides

Parmenides reminder for next week:

[Spence] We are treated to a young Socrates in the company of Zeno and Parmenides as Cephalus recounts a story that he heard in a roundabout way (via Antiphon, father of Pyrilampes, father of Clazomenae, half-brother of Adeimantus). Socrates is at Antiphon’s home where he hears Zeno’s book read aloud. After the reading he questions Zeno on one and many. Parmenides steps in and sharply interrogates Socrates forcing him to walk back some of his assertions, notably that one thing can be many. He asserts that even in the cases where one thing can seemingly be in many places, it is actually just parts of it that are in many places. Moreover, how exactly parts of the whole impart the nature of the wholeness into the things they share with leads to some strange and somewhat paradoxical conclusions, like something being small by partaking in smallness necessarily means separating smallness from the one thus making one—smallness itself—bigger, and so on.