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In 1939 Gilbert Ryle broached his apparently inexhaustible cask of new thoughts on Plato. He argued in a paper and a book-review in Mind that the Parmenides was "an early essay in the theory of types."¹ He found the same interests active in the Theaetetus and Sophist, other late dialogues which have philosophical and dramatic ties with the Parmenides. A year or so earlier, in "Categories," he had paid Aristotle a modified compliment, but his Aristotle was in essentials, one of those already established in the literature. He has been understood to say that in those days it looked as though Aristotle had been, for the time at any rate, pretty well surveyed while Plato still called for exploration. But there is more than that to the interest that brings him so often back to Plato. In his studies of the late dialogues it became almost an alliance. Here are some comments, inadequate thanks for the illumination and excitement that have resulted. They centre in Kyle's discussion of the dialogue which Russell in The Principles of Mathematics called "perhaps the best collection of antinomies ever made."²

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-15418-0_15

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