Plato on Coming-to-Be: A Midway Path between Eleaticism and Creationism

Abstract

The Parmenides is the locus of Plato’s theoria motus abstracti (that is, abstract kinematics) for it is here that Plato gives a mereological and locational analysis of motion (First Deduction: 138b7-139b3) and discusses the famous puzzle of the instant of change (Second Deduction: 156c1-157b5). But there is another scholarly very neglected text from this dialogue that provides us with great insights about Plato’s theory of change: the Fifth Deduction (160b3-163b6) and its answer to the Eleatic argument against coming-to-be.

I shall devote my paper to Plato’s discussion of the coming-to-be (γένεσις) of beings from what is not; first, by expounding what Plato says in the Fifth Deduction, second, by putting his theory in a bigger philosophical ecosystem (the quarrel between Eleaticism and Creationism). Then, I shall argue for two points: first, coming-to-be as described in the Fifth Deduction is, at first sight, incompatible with Plato’s account of motion given in the First Deduction; second, the logic behind the Fifth Deduction - if consistent - must be a non-classical temporal logic that restricts Leibniz’s laws of identity to some but not all properties.