Plato's Theory of Stuffs

NICHOLASDENYER

. . . the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the
properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol
is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadult-
erated by anything that is beautiful.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book.

Those who examine Plato's theory of forms have from Aristotle onwards
tended to interpret it as a theory of universals. Enough in the dialogues
appears to support such an interpretation for it not to be entirely wrong-
headed. Nevertheless, the conception of forms as universals or as the
meanings of general terms produces a baffled incredulity when we consider
some of the things that Plato has to say about them. It would be outlandish
enough anyway to be told that a universal is an object; it becomes positively
outrageous when we are informed furthermore that the object which is the
universal being a so-and-so is itself a very superior so-and-so, existing
separate from and independent of the particulars it characterizes and
causing them to have the nature that they do. Could Plato have seriously
thought and meant things so foolish? I doubt it, for there is a more charit-
able, less Aristotelian, way to interpret what Plato says about forms. This
is the way suggested by Eudoxus and those others who apparently drew on
Anaxagoras' theory of the homoiomeries in the exposition of Plato: a
Platonic form is like an Anaxagorean stuff and accounts for the character of
a particular 'as white does, by being mixed with the white thing' (Aristotle,
Metaphysics 991314-19, 1079^8-23). In this paper I wish to build on
Eudoxus' suggestion and show how all the most troubling contentions that
Plato makes about forms turn out to be either true or at least quite plausible
if we suppose that forms are meant, not as universals, but as chemical
elements instead. Plato's theory of forms is not a grotesque misunder-
standing of universals; it is a sober, intelligent, and largely true account of
the elemental stuffs from which the world is made.
The variant on the theory of forms that Plato sets forth in the Phaedo
seems the most amenable to the suggestion that forms are chemical ele-
ments, and is as resistant as any to the suggestion that forms are universals.
I will therefore be drawing primarily on the Phaedo to illustrate my sug-

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Nicholas Denyer

gestion, and it is primarily the forms of the Phaedo that I mean my suggest-
ion to fit. Nevertheless the suggestion that forms may be considered
as chemical elements illuminates some of Plato's other remarks about
them, and so I will quote, though more selectively, from other dialogues
too.

II

Consider the contrast between my ring and gold, the element of which it is
made. My ring has parts, a top and a bottom, a left and a right. There are
no such parts to gold. My ring is therefore composite and gold is incom-
posite, just as particulars and forms respectively are said to be (suntheton,
asuntheton; Phaedo 78C7-8). From this fundamental contrast several
others follow. Since it has parts my ring, the particular, can be divided into
those parts and thus is dialuton; whereas gold, the form, has no parts into
which it may be divided and thus is adialuton {Phaedo 8ob2-4). My ring
was generated (by putting its parts together) and may be destroyed (by the
separation of its parts); it is therefore mortal {thneton; Phaedo 8ob4) like
any particular. Gold however, being without parts, is always in existence
and immortal (aei on kai athanaton; Phaedo 79^2); for how may a thing be
generated or destroyed other than by assembly or dissolution of its parts?
My ring might be destroyed, for instance by being dissolved in aqua
regia. Gold however would survive the dissolution of my ring, and indeed
of gold things generally; just as the element sodium long pre-existed the
development of those electrolytic techniques whereby particular lumps of
sodium were first produced. It is not only generation and destruction that
may be defined in terms of rearrangement of parts. Similar terms will
define also the concept of change or alteration: a real change is undergone
by a thing when its parts alter their positions with respect to one another.1
Something which has parts, such as my ring, is therefore liable to change;
whereas something without parts, such as gold, 'is always the same way in
the same respects, and never admits of any change in any fashion or
manner whatsoever' {Phaedo 78d5~7). In all these respects what Plato says
of the contrast between form and particular is quite plausibly said of the
contrast between gold and my ring.

1 •
1 take the term 'real change' from Geach and I accept his distinction between
it and what he calls 'Cambridge change'. See e.g. P. T. Geach, Truth, Love and
Immortality (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 90-92. My criterion is not circular:
when it speaks of an alteration in the arrangement of spatial parts this can be
adequately glossed as a Cambridge alteration.

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' It is not only in its having spatial parts, a top and a bottom, a left and a
right, that my ring contrasts with gold. For my ring, like any particular
made of gold, is made of other things as well. No process of refinement can
* remove all impurities from a sample of gold, and so no particular gold
thing is gold through and through. Quite the opposite however is true of
f gold, for the metal itself is uncontaminated by any impurity. Gold is gold,
and nothing but; whereas my ring contains a bit of silver too. Gold then is
uniform (monoeides; Phaedo 8ob2), pure (katharon; Phaedo (>ib2), un-
mixed (eilikrines; Phaedo 66a2-3), and isolated (auto kath' hauto; Phaedo
66a2). T h e s e are not just e m p t y honorifics, b u t sober t r u t h . N o n e of this
holds of m y ring, which although gold is several other things besides
(polueides; Phaedo 8ob4) a n d far therefore from being p u r e a n d u n m i x e d .
At this point it is perhaps relevant to adduce Republic 470.d4.-5, according
to which particulars, unlike forms, 'wallow between not being and being
unmixedly'. M y ring inhabits j u s t such a demi-monde between being and
not being. Although it is gold, there is nevertheless a clear sense whereby
in virtue of its impurities, in virtue that is of t h e stuff other t h a n gold which
it contains, m y ring is also not gold.
T h i s purity of forms and the impurity of their corresponding particulars
is the foundation of some epistemological contrasts between t h e m . You
may suppose a particular so-and-so not to b e so-and-so, b u t you would
never make such a mistake of t h e form (Phaedo 74by-c3). T h i s again
turns out t r u e of the contrast between gold and m y r i n g : any fool knows
that gold is gold, b u t you might easily think m y ring is not. F o r m s , we are
told further, are what science deals w i t h : in their realm alone is t r u t h to b e
found, and it can b e approached only b y the intellect (Phaedo 65e6-66a8).
Particulars b y contrast are not the objects of science b u t of perception
alone, which does not p u t us in touch with t r u t h a n d exactitude (Phaedo
65ao.-ci). N o w a handbook of physical chemistry will contain m u c h infor-
mation about gold and the other elements, whereas m y ring will not appear
even in a footnote. A n d this does not mean that our handbook is defective or
incomplete. F u r t h e r m o r e , what t h e handbook says about gold, and says
truly about gold, will not b e an abbreviated generalization about h o w all
particulars m a d e of gold behave. Gold has a density of 19-32 g/cc at 20 °C, a
melting point of 1064-43 °C, a n d a n electrical resistivity at 20 °C of 2-35
microhms/cm. T h e s e things are j u s t not t r u e of m y ring and t h e other
particulars m a d e of gold. Because of t h e impurities within t h e m it will be
strictly false to say for instance that all particular gold objects have a
melting point of 1064-43 °C- T h e most we can say is that such things are
approximately true, a n d that the tendency of particular gold objects is to
melt at such a temperature. As Plato puts it, particular gold objects
'strive' (oregetai; Phaedo JSa2) t 0 b e like t h e form whose character is
recorded in t h e scientific facts about gold. W e may t h e n claim for gold
just what Plato claims for a form: it, unlike its particulars, is an object of

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scientific knowledge.2 This difference between forms and particulars calls

for a difference in the faculties whereby men deal with them. When Plato
locates this in the difference between the intellect and the senses once more
he says something that is true of gold and my ring. My ring may be seen
and felt, but the element gold is invisible and intangible, and for that
matter undetectable by smell, taste or hearing. Nevertheless, we do still have
a faculty to deal with gold, for we are able to think about it.
The contrasts Plato draws between forms and particulars match then the
contrasts it is natural to draw between chemical elements and the objects
made of them. What however of the relations Plato says hold between
particular and form? Here too we will find that what he says turns out to be
highly plausible if forms are understood as chemical elements.
A particular, we are told, resembles its form (proseoikenai; Phaedo
74e3). Now my ring is certainly like gold. For gold is gold and my ring too
is gold. Gold melts at 1064-43 °C a n d m v r m S t 0 ° would melt at about that
temperature. The density of gold is 19-32 g/cc at 20 °C and my ring too has
more or less that density. And so on. It is worth enlarging on the sort of
similarity we have here: it is not a sharing of common properties between
form and particular. Thus gold and my ring resemble one another even
though they do not have the same melting point, the same density, or the
same electrical resistivity. Furthermore, although we call both the element
and the ring gold it is not clear that even this shows both to share a common
property of being gold. One may well doubt that the element gold is self-
predicating and that there is a single predicate 'is gold' recurring in both
'Gold is gold' and 'My ring is gold'. If anything, only the latter is a pre-
dication and the former is a statement of identity.
Resemblance however is a symmetrical relation and thus does not
distinguish form from particular. What relations do? When Plato intro-
duces the thesis that a particular resembles a form he is quick to add that it
is by comparison deficient or lacking (endeesteron, phauloteron; Phaedo
75b2, 75b8). Here too sense is readily made of this when we invoke my
ring and the element gold. We have seen that in spite of the tendency my
ring has to be like gold there are nevertheless various discrepancies between
the behaviour of particular gold objects and the chemical facts about gold.
These discrepancies however cast no doubt on those chemical facts: the
fault lies with the particular gold objects and the impurities they contain
rather than with chemistry. My ring thus fails to live up to the standard

2
See Brian Ellis, Rational Belief Systems (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979),
1-5, for a trenchant statement of the claim that every scientific law is true only of
idealized entities. Plato would, I think, concur with this generalization, if we
may judge by the derogatory remarks in Republic 529cff.on the heavenly bodies
we perceive and on how they do not live up exactly to the laws of mathematical
astronomy.

3i8

1
 Plato's Theory of Stuffs

set by the element gold, and is therefore by comparison defective. It is in

t this light that we should, I think, understand also the claim that a form is a
paradigm for its particulars {Euthyphro 6e4~5). Gold provides a paradigm
for particular things made of gold in that it is through our knowledge of the
element that we may tell of any disputed particular whether it is in fact
gold, by seeing how closely it matches what we know gold to be.
A particular, we are told furthermore, 'puts us in mind of its form, and
by the process of anamnesis brings to the surface hitherto latent knowledge
of the form which it so defectively resembles (Phaedo 74Ci3~d5). The
example of gold and my ring does not make plausible Plato's claim about
the origins of that latent knowledge: the claim that such knowledge is the
trace within us of a fuller knowledge enjoyed by the soul when outside the
body between phases of incarnation. But that is because nothing whatsoever
could make such a claim plausible.
The example of gold and my ring does however bestow some plausibility
on the claim that there is latent within us a knowledge of forms and that
this knowledge is elicited by perception of particulars. Let us consider
this fact: we have a concept of gold, for we sometimes judge that particulars
are gold and we sometimes make judgements about the element itself. This
fact calls for explanation, yet no explanation is forthcoming on the empiri-
cist assumption that we start our lives as tabulae rasae untainted by innate
ideas, and then acquire our concepts by abstracting them from perception.
For us to form the concepts we do by abstraction would be hard enough
anyway. Why on earth should a tabula rasa abstract the concept of green
from the green things it sees rather than Goodman's concept of grue?3
And it is surely impossible for a tabula rasa to abstract a concept from a
handful of particulars when every single one of them instantiates that
concept at best impurely and defectively. Grant however that we are born
with the concept of gold latent within us, assign to perceiving particular
gold things the role of eliciting this knowledge, and you explain how we can
talk of gold as we do.
Let us consider also this fact: besides having a concept of gold we also
have some quite precise knowledge of the metal, for instance its melting
point and density. This fact too calls for explanation. Once more none is
forthcoming on the empiricist assumption that quite without innate
knowledge of the nature of gold we acquired the knowledge we have by
induction from perceiving how particular gold things behave. For it is hard
enough anyway on this assumption to understand how perceiving a few
green emeralds should enable us to catch on to the general truth that all

3
According to Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, 2nd edn (Indian-
apolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 74, this term 'applies to all things
examined before t just in case they are green but to other things just in case they
are blue'.

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Nicholas Denyer

emeralds are green. Why did we not induce instead to the falsehood that all
emeralds are grue? When moreover, as is the case with our knowledge .
of gold, the particulars we perceive are at best defective and the truth to I
which they lead is not even a true generalization about those particulars, it
is impossible to see how induction might work. Grant however that we are I
born with this knowledge of gold latent within us, assign to perceiving
particular gold things the role of eliciting this knowledge, and you explain
how we know of gold what we do.4 In these ways then my ring and other *
gold objects may be said to produce anamnesis of gold; and thus in one more I
respect what Plato says of forms fits the chemical elements.
What exactly is the relation that makes a form the form of a given
particular ? Plato speaks of two relations: the presence of the form within the l
thing and the thing's having the form in common with something (parousia, >
koinOnia; Phaedo iood5-6). He adds immediately that he will insist no *
further on this terminology, but what he says subsequently is well in '
accord with it. In particular he continues to talk in terms of 'having *
shares in', using the verbs metechein (e.g. Phaedo 101C3) and metalambanein '•
{Phaedo iO2b2). People tend to read these as technical terms with a technical i
sense, translate them by the ostentatiously obscure 'participate', and then
wonder what the technical sense is. In their mundane senses however these v
words are quite naturally applied to the relation between my ring and gold.
My ring is gold, and thus has some share of gold, other shares being *
distributed among the other particulars that have gold in common with it
and in which gold is present too. *
This interpretation is confirmed by considering a third sort of thing that
Plato introduces along with particulars and forms. When a particular v
so-and-so shares in the form so-and-so, then there is also something that I
we may call 'the so-and-so in the particular' (Phaedo iO2d7), 'the so-and-so *
of the particular' (Phaedo 10204), or 'the so-and-so that the particular has' I
(Phaedo 102C2); and this third entity, like the particular and the form, is *
itself so-and-so (Phaedo iO2d7-e6). In just the same way, since my ring 1
shares in gold and since gold is present in it, we may talk of the gold in my >
ring, the gold of my ring, and the gold that my ring has; and this is of
course itself gold. The so-and-so in the particular is nothing so far- v
fetched as an 'immanent character' or a 'property-instance'. It is that quite
familiar thing, a parcel of stuff. •
We are told that when a particular ceases to share in the form so-and-so, I
when the form so-and-so ceases to be present in it, then the so-and-so in >
the particular cannot abide this change, but either leaves the particular i
or else is destroyed (e.g. Phaedo io2dy-io3a2). Suppose that we have a >
4
This and the preceding paragraph draw heavily upon the essay 'Natural *
Kinds' in W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York and
London: Columbia University Press, 1969), 114-138. >

320
 Plato's Theory of Stuffs

1 body of gas in a flask, and that the body of gas is hydrogen. This body
, t then has a share of the element hydrogen, the element hydrogen is present
) ! within it, and there is such a thing as the hydrogen in this body of gas.
t f Suppose now that this body ceases to be hydrogen. There are two and only
; I twoways in which thiscould havehappened. The hydrogen initmayhavebeen
5 f destroyed, for instance by being ignited and turned to steam; or the
1 I hydrogen in it may have seeped away unharmed (son; Phaedo io6aio). But
r ^ one thing is sure: the hydrogen in our body of gas will not have remained
there inviolate when the body ceased to be hydrogen. Here once more
something said of the forms turns out true of chemical elements,
i I Forms, we are told, explain particulars (Phaedo ioob3~e7): what makes a
; t particular so-and-so is the form so-and-so and its share in that form. Such
, | explanations are rightly acknowledged to be facile (Phaedo iood3~4).
) t All the same, nothing could be more correct than to give such an explan-
i I ation of why my ring is gold. If gold, or rather the gold in my ring, does
; f not suffice to make my ring gold, what else could? One certainly cannot
i | say for instance that my ring is gold because of the dross in it; for as Plato
I f said of another example, it would be monstrous if what made a thing gold was
i I something that was not itself gold (Phaedo ioibi-2). Aristotle asked
: f sarcastically 'If forms are causes, why are they not always generating con-
| tuiuously, but only at some times and not at others, since there exist
always both the forms and the things liable to share in them?' (De Genera-
Hone et Corruptione 335bi8-2i). The gold in my ring is not making any-
thing else gold because it is not in anything else but in my ring alone.
When however it was in something else, the ingot from which my ring was
manufactured, it made that other thing gold; and throughout its existence
it does indeed make gold whatever the thing is in which it happens to be.
This kind of causality may not have been recognized by other philosophers;
for example, I doubt that it fits neatly into any of the four kinds of cause
that Aristotle classified. Nevertheless it is true and thoroughly safe (Phaedo
looei) to say that what makes my ring gold is the gold in it.
The form so-and-so, Plato tells us, is what is primarily entitled to the
name of so-and-so. When we apply the name to particulars it is a matter of
naming them after the form (eponomazein; Phaedo io2b2, io3b7-8).
Consider the name 'gold'. We apply this name both to the element gold and
to my ring. We apply it however to the element with greater propriety than
we do to the particular, for gold alone is wholly gold, unsullied by impur-
ities. Indeed, the prime use for the name 'gold* does seem to be as the
proper name of the element. Nevertheless the particular can quite reason-
t ably borrow the name of the thing which it imperfectly resembles, which it
j shares in, and which makes it be what it is. That is why we may speak
eponomastically of my ring too as gold.5
5
For judicious remarks on this topic see T. W. Bestor, 'Common Properties
and Eponymy in Plato', Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1978), 189-207.

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Nicholas Denyer

III

All of the Phaedo's general contentions about forms, however ludicrously

false of universals, nevertheless fit, or at least may reasonably be supposed
to fit, what we now call the chemical elements; and they do so down to the
last detail. This would be enough to vindicate my interpretation of the
theory of forms as a theory not of universals but of elemental stuffs, were it
not for the forms that Plato standardly cites. They simply are not as a rule
the sort of thing that one can rightly suppose to be chemical elements.
Let it be quite clear why the standardly cited forms are an embarrassment
for my interpretation. It is no embarrassment that Plato, if we may judge
from the remarks on iron and silver in Phaedrus 263 a, would apparently
have declined to posit a form in every case where we would posit an element.
For he had no reason to suppose that such stuffs are elemental; and in
Phaedo 103CH he did posit forms of what for him would have been ele-
mental stuffs, the hot and the cold. Nor is it an embarrassment that Plato
occasionally talks as if there were forms corresponding to count nouns,
such as the forms of bed and table in Republic 50^3-4. These forms have
at best a marginal status, being not eternal but divinely manufactured
{Republic 597C1-5). We should recall also that a form for the count noun
'bee' is conspicuously absent from Meno 'jzb-c; here the thing that all bees
have in common whereby they are all bees is not described as a form.
Indeed, in the more careful expositions of the theory, count nouns are
strongly contrasted with those terms for which forms are primarily posited.
It is instructive to consider Republic 523a~524d, where Plato points out
how fingers differ from the things to which correspond the standard
examples of forms. A particular finger is not also not a finger; perception
can apply the term 'a finger' without being simultaneously forced to apply
the term 'not a finger'; and perceiving particular fingers does not make us
turn to thoughts of a form. Plato is quite correct to make these contrasts,
for the notion of an inevitable impurity and deficiency, while perfectly
apt for particular samples of chemical elements, makes no sense when we
are dealing with objects of some countable kind. This is why Aristotle
misses the mark when he objects {Peri Ideon Fragment 5 Ross) that the
Eudoxan account of forms as stuffs would make a form of man impossible.
There simply was no strong desire to posit such a form. In any case however
the occasional loose talk of forms for count nouns is quite absent from the
Phaedo: the forms posited there are quite different.
The embarrassment is rather that the forms the Phaedo posits simply are
not homoiomerous stuffs, let alone elemental ones. The vast majority of the
forms that the Phaedo posits fall into three groups. First, there are the
forms that correspond to logically attributive adjectives, such as the good,
the fine and the big. Second, there are the forms that correspond to relative
terms, such as the equal, the bigger and the smaller. Third, there are the

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forms that correspond to numerical terms, such as the two, the three and
the four. To modern eyes not one of these three groups appears to contain
names for chemical elements, but to offer instead a quite heterogeneous
variety of other things. Examining what they have in common should how-
ever remove our embarrassment. The terms that appear in each group are
all in their way incomplete. Whatever is good is a good so-and-so; whatever
is bigger is bigger than something; and nothing is barely four, but always
•• ^ four of some countable kind. Complete such a term in one way and it will
apply to an object; complete it in another and it will not. Thus the self-
same man will be both a good cricketer and not a good swimmer; the self-
same city will be bigger than Cambridge and not bigger than Rome; the
self-same bundle of cards will be four suits and not four packs. If we now
dock the necessary completions we are left with the thoughts that a parti-
cular good thing is also not good, that a particular bigger thing is also not
bigger, and that a particular thing which is four is also not four. All these,
to one not fully conscious of the need to complete such terms, will sound
very much like the ring which is gold and yet not gold because of the
impurities within it.
This then, I suggest, was how Plato came to posit forms for good,
bigger and two. He misperceived the incompleteness of such terms. He
was sufficiently alert to their incompleteness for him to realize that, unlike
count nouns and like names for elemental stuffs, each of these words both
applies and fails to apply to the very same particulars. He was not however
so fully conscious of their incompleteness that he realized the difference
between good, bigger and two on the one hand and stuffs on the other.
There was after all a tendency in the thought of his time to posit stuffs as
counterparts to predicates, and to imagine a different ingredient in a thing
for each predicate it satisfies. Hence the hots and the colds, the wets and the
dries, of Greek physics: hence also perhaps, as Myles Burnyeat has pointed
out to me, the paradox people felt in the fact that an individual thing can
remain a unity even though it satisfies many different predicates.6 Plato, I
suggest, fell in with this tendency. He was therefore led to construe these
incomplete expressions as names for elemental stuffs, and thus to posit for
each of them a form with all the features that we have seen a chemical
element may be claimed to possess.
After rightly discerning some reminiscences of Anaxagoras in earlier
dialogues John Brentlinger suggested that in the Phaedo Plato came to
realize the difference between stuff words and incomplete predicates, and
argued that this realization was Plato's motive for 'separating' forms from
particulars.7 But as we have seen in the case of gold, the theses whereby

6
See e.g. Aristotle Physics 185D25ff.and Simplicius ad loc.
7
'Incomplete Predicates and Two-World Theory of the Phaedo', Phronesis 17
(1972), 61-79.

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Nicholas Denyer

Plato expressed the separation of the forms are plausibly held to be true of
elemental stuffs also. Furthermore, Plato's separation of forms from
particulars still leaves behind that third kind of entity, the so-and-so in the
particular, which he continues to talk of for all the world as if it were a bit
of stuff. Finally, Brentlinger does not explain why Plato should have
thought that adding the separation of the forms to an otherwise quasi-
Anaxagorean account of incomplete predicates would help him escape the
difficulties that any such account of things like good, bigger and two
evidently faces as soon as those things are distinguished from stuffs.
We may then continue to suppose that the forms are intended as ele-
mental stuffs, and so we should protest at the examples Plato typically
cites. In positing forms for incomplete predicates Plato was committing
the very error against which he himself was later to warn us, that of being
misled by language into positing a form where none exists {Politicus
262cio-263ai). It is however an error that he himself came subsequently to
detect and criticize: in Parmenides I3ici2-ei Plato gives the conclusive
refutation of his hitherto inexplicit assumption that the size of particulars
is explained by the presence in varying quantities of the stuffs big, equal
and small.

IV

Fortunately this error of supposing that incomplete expressions are names

for elemental stuffs is in a sense a local one. On realizing and abandoning
this error Plato could indeed no longer use the Phaedo theory of forms for
what had been perhaps his chief purpose in devising it, the explanation of
things like goodness, bigness and threeness. Nevertheless the error can be
corrected by reference to the periodic table, leaving the essential structure of
Plato's theory unharmed.
Is however that structure itself sound? There are arguments which
purport to show that the theory of forms is not true of Plato's favoured
examples because it is internally incoherent and thus unable to be true of
anything at all. The two most enticing of these arguments were expounded
by Plato himself in the Parmenides. The first is this dilemma: either the
whole of the form is present in each particular which shares in it, or else
only a part is; if the whole, then we will have one and the same thing being
in its entirety in several places at once; if only a part, then we will have
parts in a supposedly partless form (Parmenides 13134-011). The second is
the regress—or pair of regresses—traditionally misnamed the Third Man.8

8
Misnamed for two reasons: because as Plato presents it the argument con-
cerns the form of big; and because he hesitated, on independent grounds, to
posit a form of man (Parmenides 130CI-4). The misnomer seems to stem from
Aristotle, e.g. Metaphysics 990b 17.
 Plato's Theory of Stuffs

That some objects are so-and-so requires a form so-and-so, and this
form is not one among those objects. It is however itself so-and-so, and this
resemblance between that form and those objects in turn requires a form
so-and-so which is not one among the original objects nor yet the original
form. There is thus generated a plurality, indeed an infinity, of forms for
so-and-so, contrary to the uniqueness that is supposed to distinguish each
form (Parmenides 13231-13333).
Both arguments entice, but our account of forms as chemical elements
shows how their blandishments can and should be resisted. The dilemma
would be fatal if the theory of forms posited only two kinds of things,
particulars and forms. The Phaedo however added a third, for besides gold
and my ring there is also the gold in my ring. It is in terms of this third
thing that we are to understand sharing the element or its presence. My
ring's share of gold is the gold in it, and what the presence of gold in my
ring comes down to is simply the fact that there is such a thing as the gold
in my ring. Now the gold in my ring is as a whole in my ring, for no part of
it is elsewhere; and the gold in my ring is therefore distinct from the gold
in anything else. The gold in an object is not however identical with the
element gold as a whole, and need we suppose it a part of that element?
\ The gold in my ring therefore parries the dilemma, for it offers a third
way of sharing in an element besides the two that the dilemma mentions and
refutes. It disposes incidentally also of Aristotle's objection to the Eudoxan
account of forms, that it prevents forms from being separate, eternal and
unchanging (Peri Ideon Fragment 5 Ross). The Eudoxan account has this
effect not on the element gold itself, but only on the gold in my ring,
which we may with Plato readily allow is not separate from my ring nor
immune to destruction and change.
What of the regress? Does the theory of forms inconsistently require that
there be infinite series of golds? If gold were gold in the same way that my
ring is, and if gold and my ring were therefore both gold by sharing some
third thing between them, and if this third thing were itself gold in just
the way that those two were, then we would indeed have a third gold and a
fourth gold and so on to infinity. But the theory of forms neither asserts
nor even presupposes that such conditions hold. The resemblance between
gold things and gold did not, we saw, indicate that they shared any property
in common.9 Gold is not gold in the same way that my ring is. It is indeed
just as true to say that gold is gold as it is to say that my ring is gold; if

9
The point merits stress in view of a very natural tendency to think otherwise.
Thus according to F. C. White, 'Plato on Naming-After', Philosophical Quarterly
29 (1979), 255-259, at p. 257, 'It is resemblance and the implied sharing of
• properties which gives rise to the regress' (my italics). See however the seventh of
Nelson Goodman's 'Seven Strictures on Similarity' in Experience and Theory,
Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds) (London: Duckworth, 1970), 19-29.

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anything, it is truer. Saying that gold is gold is however not so much self-
predication of the element as self-identity. For gold is not gold even in
virtue of sharing in itself, let alone in virtue of sharing in some other thing,
There is nothing else that makes gold gold, and there is no such thing as the
gold in gold. The threatened regress never then begins. It stops before it
even starts, at a single form or element of gold.

The theory of forms is then undamaged by these objections in the Parmen-

ides. It remains as a sober and coherent account of the fundamental stuffs
from which all things are made. Sober and coherent, and also untrue.
In discerning that there are such stuffs modern chemistry has done much
to vindicate Plato's theory, but modern chemistry gives it also a most
compelling retort. For chemistry is atomistic, and Plato's theory remains a
plausible account of elemental stuffs only so long as we ignore the truth of
atomism. In atoms of gold we have particular gold things uncontaminated
by the presence of any other element. Unlike my ring they are as purely
gold as gold itself. They therefore subvert one of Plato's prime contrasts,
that between the purity of the form and the impurity of its particulars.
Atoms of gold would moreover still survive even if every larger gold
particular were dissolved in aqua regia. They thus show that the survival of
gold under such circumstances would be no proof of a power to survive
when wholly uninstantiated, and no proof therefore of an existence
separate from particulars. The fact that there are gold particulars with such
a purity and permanence allows us furthermore to identify gold with the
mereological sum of those particulars and say that gold is the spatially dis-
joint entity which they compose. For in identifying gold with these particu-
lars we will deny neither its purity nor its power to survive uninstantiated
by particulars of larger bulk. The existence of gold atoms permits the
identification; ontological economy is now able to compel it.
Some salient theses about the- forms survive the identification. Forms
remain as objects of a scientific knowledge elicited by perception; the
so-and-so in a particular, now understood as the mereological sum of those
so-and-so atoms that the particular contains, continues to be what makes a
particular so-and-so; particulars of middling size are as deficient and
impure as they originally were; and the particulars that are so-and-so
still only borrow that name from their form. Other and equally salient
theses about the forms must now however be rejected. Forms now have
parts; the purity of the form so-and-so is compromised by the fact that its
sub-atomic parts, while not of any other form, nevertheless are not them-
selves exactly so-and-so; and if fashionable cosmogonies are right to
allege that once upon a time there were no atoms, then forms—long-

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lasting though they may be—are still not quite eternal. Plato's theory of
forms is perhaps for these reasons ultimately a failure. But I hope that my
Eudoxan interpretation has shown how very close it comes to success.10

f
St John's College, Cambridge

10
An earlier version of this paper was read at Downing College, Cambridge. I
have benefited greatly from discussing these topics with G. E. M. Anscombe,
M. F. Burnyeat, W. R. Jordan, S. A. R. Makin, and G. E. L. Owen, of whom
perhaps none agreed with all my conclusions. Ultimately the paper stems from a
talk I gave at the Victoria University of Wellington during a most pleasant visit
there in July 1980.

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