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Studies in Plato's Metaphysics. Edited by R. E. Allen. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: General Publishing Co. 1965. Pp. xii, 452. $10.80.

In the Gorgias, Socrates would have it that, "The rhetorician, then, is not a teacher of law courts and other public gatherings as to what is right or wrong, but merely a creator of beliefs; for evidently he could never instruct so large a gathering on such weighty matters in a short time." Whatever else the contributors to this volume (Cherniss, Cornford, Ryle, Vlastos, Owen and Allen himself among them) may be, they are certainly not practitioners of the art of rhetoric. All twenty selections, as Allen tells us in his excellent introduction, have appeared previously. All are quite definitely—sometimes even passionately—concerned with the right and wrong of Plato. And if the authors are unsuccessful in convincing each other, it is likely that they will be no more successful in convincing their readers. The reader, indeed, is likely to return from his journey more bewildered than believing. Not that this is altogether undesirable or avoidable: Plato's theory of the Ideas or Forms, the unifying theme of the work, is certainly a weighty enough matter, especially as it appears (or does not appear?) in the later dialogues (viz., Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Politicus, Philebus and Laws). The Timaeus is another case entirely. Its very place in the Platonic corpus is debated in two of the selections (Owen and Cherniss) while the nature and extent of its mythological elements are the subject of two others (Vlastos and Morrow). The major issue with which most of the selections are concerned is that of the ontological status of the Ideas or Forms, especially in the light of the apparently devastating criticisms which Plato attributes to Parmenides (five of the selections have the Parmenides as their central topic). As we might expect, opinions are varied. Those commentators who approach the dialogues from the standpoint of non-formal linguistic analysis tend to see Plato as tacitly admitting the validity of the criticisms of Parmenides. There is really not much being in the Ideas or Forms, as is evidenced by Plato's reluctance to talk about them at all in the dialogues following the Parmenides, and Plato came to see that his difficulties were conceptual and not ontological in character. Thus, Cross sees the Form not as an object known, but as "a formula" —a what is said of something (pp. 27-28)—though it is not altogether clear what it means to say, "...the thing justice has slid into the predicate... (p. 29)." Ryle holds that the Forms are universals or abstract nouns (p. 107); that the theory of the Ideas or Forms is not