The present study sets out to clarify some issues in Platos later thought. For one thing, the author suggests that Platos Parmenides, far from acknowledging defeat vis-à-vis the charge of self-predication, clearly indicates that the criticism at stake is misguided. Plato, in fact, identifies patterns of thought in Speusippuss philosophy that contributed to such misunderstandings and hence must be subject to severe criticism. For another, the author proves that the epistemological passage in the Seventh Letter provides evidence that - far from accepting the charge of self-predication - Plato presented something like an error theory, showing what is wrong with the ideas concerned. Inasmuch as these theses run counter to current tendencies of mainstream scholarship, the present study provides a different perspective. Rather than settling somewhere in-between visions of self-criticism and honest perplexity on the part of Plato, we should consider that our philosopher may well have been on top of things, and thus was capable of arguing his case for the theory of forms against criticism arising from within the Academy.

Andreas Graeser (born in Greiz, Germany, in 1942) received his doctorates from the Universities of Giessen and Princeton. From 1979 until retirement in 2008 he was professor of philosophy at the University of Berne, Switzerland. Publications include: Ernst Cassirer (1994) and Philosophie und Ethik (1999). As visiting professor, he spent some time at the Universities of Texas-at-Austin and Columbia in New York City, and as former member of the Institute for Advanced Study and fellow of the University, at Princeton.

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