Platonic Causes

DAVID SEDLEY

ABSTRACT
This paper examines Platos ideas on cause-effect relations in the Phaedo. It
maintains that he sees causes as things (not events, states of affairs or the like),
with any information as to how that thing brings about the effect relegated to a
strictly secondary status. This is argued to make good sense, so long as we recognise that aition means the thing responsible and exploit legal analogies in order
to understand what this amounts to. Furthermore, provided that we do not presuppose that we already know what can and what cannot count as a cause, Plato
proves to have an attractive case for his principle that all causation is a matter
of like causing like. Once we appreciate this, we are a little closer to understanding his more idiosyncratic principle, which although puzzling is ubiquitous in his
writings and often invoked as a premise in key arguments, that opposites cannot
cause opposites.
The last part of the paper turns to formal causes, defending Platos advocacy
of them, and examining their role in the Parmenides Third Man Argument. The
main proposal is that Platos conception of Forms as causes opens the door to a
better version of that arguments Non-identity premise than those currently
available.

I. What is a cause?
The nal argument of Platos Phaedo seeks to show that such is the
souls causal role as the bringer of life to the body that it itself must be
essentially alive; therefore on the approach of the opposite property, death,
it is unable to perish, and must instead take the only alternative option,
to withdraw. In order to prepare the ground for this argument, Socrates
recounts his own intellectual progress with regard to the correct understanding of causation (96a-102a). In his youth, he explains, his search for
the causes of things led him to consider all sorts of unsuitable candidates
for this role, items which did not on re ection turn out to be properly correlated to the effects they were postulated to explain. Nor was he, as he
had hoped to be, enlightened by the writings of Anaxagoras, who, having
promised to explain the world as the product of an intelligence, in the
event named as causes the same kind of unsatisfactory items as others
did air, water, aether etc. This, in Socrates view, was as useless as it
would be to cite as the cause of Socrates sitting in prison, not his intelligence, but his bones, sinews etc. In his disappointment at Anaxagoras,
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1998

Phronesis XLIII/2

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Socrates retreated to his Second Voyage, his reliance on the hypothesis

that each property of a thing is caused by the appropriate Form: F things
are (or become) F because of the F. However, later on (105b-c) he seems
to allow a more subtle kind of cause, namely that F things should be
made F by the presence of something which essentially brings the Form
F-ness with it, in the way that re, being essentially hot, by its presence
in things makes them hot.
Plato favours the following range of locutions to express what appears
to be his notion of cause:
(1) ation/ata: cause/causation1
(2) di + accusative, or causal dative: because of
(3) poien = to cause (to), to make (F) (99b7, 100d5)
These, leaving aside syntactic differences, are to all appearances used
interchangeably throughout, and there is every reason to conclude that
they combine to represent for Plato a unitary notion of cause. He is
ready to consider a variety of competing claimants to the description
cause, admitting only some of them as satisfying all the relevant criteria. But those criteria, regarding what in principle may or may not count
as a cause, do no themselves appear to shift.
The adjective atiow followed by a genitive means responsible for. To
give the cause (ation) of x is to point to the thing responsible (t ation)
for x, and thereby to assign to that thing the responsibility (ata) for x
much in the way that a lawcourt seeks to determine the person responsible for a crime, or to attribute the responsibility. When I say the thing
responsible, my word thing is deliberately vague. Plato does not in this
context show the slightest interest in distinguishing between metaphysically different kinds of thing: the thing considered as a candidate for the
cause of some effect can just as well be a physical stuff like re or bone,
a mathematical process like addition, the good, a soul, intelligence, or a
Form such as Largeness or Oddness. What determines the success or failure of the candidate cause is nothing to do with its metaphysical status,2
but purely, as we shall see, its logical or quasi-logical relation to the effect.
Accepted September 1997
1
Michael Frede (The original notion of cause, in M. Scho eld et al. (ed.), Doubt
and Dogmatism (Oxford 1980), 217-49, points to a distinction in the Phaedo between
ation, cause, and ata, causal account vel sim. I think that there is a tendency
in this direction, although Plato is not entirely consistent about it, cf. esp. 98d7-e1,
101c4-5.
2
The contrary assumption is a major weakness in an in uential article with which

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Standardly, it is the thing itself, rather than some fact or event involving it, that Plato nominates as cause, much as in a legal context a person,
rather than an event involving that person, is ultimately nominated as responsible for, or guilty of (atiow), the crime. Occasionally in this passage
of the Phaedo, however, what is nominated as the cause is not a simple
thing but a complex process, event or fact involving it. This complex
description, it turns out, can be used interchangeably with a simple reference to the thing which features in it (96e2-4, cf. 101b4-7; 98d-99a;
100d3-8). For example, if 10 is greater than 8 because of 2 having been
added to it, that turns out to be equivalent to saying that 10 is greater
than 8 by 2 or because of 2 (causal dative).
Which of these two is meant to be the more precise formulation of the
cause? It is often assumed that the fuller formulation must be the more
correct, but there seems to me to be strong evidence against any such presumption. At 100d3-e3 Socrates rst uses this fuller type of formulation
what makes things beautiful is, he hypothesises, the presence or sharing
(or whatever it may be) of the Form of Beautiful. However, he then declines to specify the nature of that Form-particular relationship (for I
dont go so far as to insist on that: o gr ti toto diisxurzomai, d6-7),
and instead strips the causal statement down to what he declares to be
its completely safe kernel: It is because of [causal dative] the beautiful
that all beautiful things are beautiful.3 I read this as strong evidence that
the essence of a causal statement lies in its nominating the item which
functions as the cause, and that any further statement about how the
item achieves its effect is secondary. This again invites a legal analogy:
ultimately the jury must decide that you were responsible (atiow) for
the murder; how you brought it about strangulation, starvation, poisoning etc. is secondary when it comes to the apportionment of guilt or
responsibility.
Platos pared down causal statement here, It is because of the F that
F things are F, claims to be utterly safe infallible. Frequently in his
I can nd no common ground at all: G. Vlastos, Reasons and causes in the Phaedo,
Philos. Rev. 78 (1969), 291-325, repr. in his Platonic Studies (Princeton 1973).
3
At 101b-d it turns out that to say It is F because it participates in the F itself
is already safer than to cite a clever cause of the type already exposed as bogus.
But only It is F because of the F is completely safe (sfalstaton): see 100d.
Socrates unapologetic use of metxein and its cognates in the former passage, at
101c, as also already at 100c5, counts against the usual assumption that his refusal at
100d6-7 to specify the Form-particular relationship is a confession of ignorance or
uncertainty about it, and thus supports my proposal that he is, rather, demoting it
to the status of secondary relevance in causal contexts.

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dialogues propositions with this form are treated as self-evident truths: for
example, that it is because of wisdom that the wise are wise, because of
temperance that the temperate are temperate.4 Moreover, Plato is by no
means alone in treating causation along these lines. What is essentially
the same principle that like causes like can be traced back to Anaxagoras
(B10), and forward to Aristotle (especially Metaphysics Z 9)5 and Hellenistic debate.
Conversely, and more idiosyncratically, Plato often treats as selfevidently impossible statements to the effect that it is because of the
un-F that F things are F, where un-F is, in some sense recognised by
Plato, the opposite of F. The language used to express such an impossibility is both strong and explicit. Here are some prominent examples:
Phd. 68d: that someone should be brave because of cowardice is
irrational or illogical (logon).
Phd. 68e: that people should be temperate because of intemperance
is impossible (dnaton).
Phd. 100a-b: that someone should be large because of something
small is weird (traw).
Parmenides 131c-d: it will be illogical (logon) if Forms are divided
up, so that what causes large things to be large is a relatively small
part of Largeness.
Republic I 335c-d: that musicians should because of their music make
people unmusical, or the just because of their justice make people
unjust, is impossible (dnaton).
Protagoras 355d: that people should do what is bad because they are
overcome by what is good is ridiculous (geloon). (That the talk of
being overcome by something states the cause of the behaviour in
question has been made explicit back at 352d8, ation, and 353a1,
di tata.)
Theaetetus 199d: that knowledge should cause ignorance, ignorance
cause knowledge, or blindness cause seeing is a great illogicality
(poll loga).
It seems abundantly clear that Plato sees some causal relationships, of the
the F makes things F type, as conceptually self-evident, and others, of
the the F makes things un-F type, as unthinkable. It is hard not to conclude, both from his attitude and from the language used (logon etc.),
that Plato sees the basic causal relationship as a matter of logic, on a par
4
5

Tht. 145d11, Protag. 332a8-b1, Hp.Ma. 287c-d, 289d.

See J. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London 1979), I 118-19.

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with the self-evident truth of tautologies and the self-evident falsity of

self-contradictions. The question is, what is it about his view of cause
that makes these matters so self-evident?
First, it is worth remarking that his abhorrence at opposites causing
opposites somehow re ects a broader abhorrence at the idea that one of
a pair of opposites might in any way characterise the other. According to
the Phaedo (102b-103c), a pair of opposites like small and large may coexist in the same object, taking it in turns to advance and retreat
according to the relation in which the object is currently being viewed,
and one of them will succeed the other in a process of change like growth.
But, emphatically, they will never dare to be characterised by each other:
the large in you will never become small. In the Parmenides (129b-e)
Socrates urges at length and in the strongest possible terms that, while any
particular may unproblematically participate in both of a pair of opposites,
it would be bizarre (traw), amazing etc. if Likeness itself were unlike,
if One itself were many, and in general if the actual genera and species
displayed their opposites within themselves, undergoing these opposites
as affections (129c). Yet again in the Sophist (252d), that motion should
be at rest or rest be in motion is by the greatest necessities impossible
(taw megstaiw ngkaiw dnaton). Or, to take an adverbial version of the
same abhorrence, in the Theaetetus (189c-d; cf. Rep. 382a4-5) Socrates is
worried by the description of something as truly false, which he compares to slowly quick, heavily light or any other opposite coming
about not in accordance with its own nature but in the opposite way to itself, in accordance with the nature of its own opposite. Still in the Sophist
it is quite bizarre (mla topon) according to the sophist (240b-c), and
daring according to the Eleatic Stranger (258d), to af rm that there is
ntvw t m n, and arguably the daring statement only proves acceptable
to the latter because he has decided in the end that being and not-being
are not true opposites.6
Just how intimate the link is between these various kinds of logically
abhorrent interaction between opposites is not a simple question to
answer. But there is some reason to think that Plato would see the adverbial cases, F-ly un-F, as virtually interchangeable with the causal cases,
un-F because of F. In the Protagoras (332b-c), at any rate, Socrates

Why then does he implicitly allow the same to be characterised by different

(Sph. 255e)? Perhaps he does not consider same and different to be opposites: at least,
I know of no evidence that he does. At Tim. 35a7-8 they are hard to mix but can
be combined by force.

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argues for a straight equivalence between somethings being done F-ly and
its being done out of F-ness (causal dative), for instance that what is
done foolishly is what is done out of folly. So the puzzlement over slowly
quick and the like may even be reducible to puzzlement over the causal
version, quick because of slowness. Alternatively, and more plausibly,
both may be reducible to puzzlement as to how quickness could be in any
way characterised by slowness.
I am very far from pretending to understand what is going on in these
and similar passages. But I am con dent (a) that the pattern of reasoning
I have documented is far too deep-seated in Platos thought to be explained away either as humorous or as his idiosyncratic way of expressing some harmless truth, and (b) that we will never fully understand
Platos logic and metaphysics until we do understand what is driving him
here. Some of the examples I have listed, such as those at Protagoras
355d, Parmenides 131c-d and Theaetetus 199d, provide the basis of crucial refutations within Platonic arguments, and it is a pity that modern
commentators have failed to recognise that this strange but ubiquitous
Platonic causal principle is at work in them.
As a step towards understanding why Plato is so ercely attached to
the principle that opposites cannot cause opposites, the most that I can
hope to achieve in this paper is an improved grasp of its positive counterpart, the principle that what causes F must itself be F.
First we must take a glance at the kind of causes that Socrates considers acceptable, and the kind he considers spurious, in the autobiographical passage of the Phaedo. The following chart lists the main examples he
discusses there, adding in square brackets a number of guesses as to how
he might complete the picture. (For the laws cited here, see p. 121)
Causation at Phd. 96a-101c (+ 105b-c)

effect

spurious cause

objectio n

(a) a human beeating, or adding

esh to esh
ings growth
(= becoming
(96c7-d5)
large) (96c6-7)

[these also
bring about
shrinkage e.g.
of the food?]

(b) being large

[in relation to
another adult]
(96d8-e1)

head also results

in smallness
(Law 3), and is
itself small
(Law 1) (100c8101b2)

a head (96e1)

( rst voyage) (second voyage) (105b-c)

intelligent cause safe cause
subtle
cause
[part of
providentially
designed life
cycle?]
?

[largeness]

largeness
(101a1-5)

the largeness in us

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(cont. Causation at Phd. 96a-101c (+ 105b-c))

effect

spurious cause

objectio n

( rst voyage) (second voyage) (105b-c)

intelligent cause safe cause
subtle
cause

(c) 10 being more

than 8
(96e1-3)

2
(96e2-3)

[2 also
makes 8
less (Law 3)]

numerousness
(101b4-6)

(d) 1 becoming 2
(96e7-9,
97a5-7)

addition (97a1)
or division
(97a7)

theyd be
opposite causes
of the same
effect (Law 2)
(97a7-b3)

twoness
(101c2-7)

(e) shape and

position of
the earth
(97d5-98a2)

air, aether,
water (Anaxagoras) (98c1)

[these could
result in any
shape/arrangement? (Law 3)]

to give it
stability
(108e-109a)
cf. (g)

(f ) celestial
motions (96b9,
98a2-b2)

aether (Anaxagoras) (98c1)

[aether could just

as easily produce
the opposite
motions (Law 3)]

[to communicate number

etc.? (Timaeus
39b, 46e-47c,
90c-d)]

(g) the earths

stability
(99b6-8)

a vortex
(Empedocles)
or a cushion
of air (Anaxagoras) (99b6-8)

[a vortex also
brings about
motion; air also
lets things fall
(Law 3)]

part of
the overall
good cosmic
arrangement
(99c5-6)

(h) Socrates sitting in prison

(98c2-4)

bones and
sinews (98c4-d6)

bones and sinews

are just as
effective for
running away
(Law 3)
(98e5-99a4)

the Athenians [sitting?]

and Socrates
judgements
about what is
best (98e1-5)

(i) thought/wisdom blood (Empe(phronein)

docles), air
(96b3ff.)
(Anaximines),
re (Heraclitus),
brain (Alcmaeon?) (96b3ff.)

[these things can

have the opposite
effect, e.g. in a
corpse (Law 3)]

wisdom
( phronesis) is
intrinsically
good (69a-b)

(j) a things being

beautiful
(100c10-d1)

[same colour/
shape can make
a thing ugly
(Law 3)]

[by (human or the beautiful

divine) design] (100d3-e3)

its colour, or
shape (100d1-3)

[rest?]

soul

To illustrate the full range of this scheme, let me invent an example.

Imagine in column 1 the question What is the cause of its being hot in
summer? A spurious cause (column 2) might be given by the astronomers answer The suns movement in the ecliptic, to which the objection (in column 3) would perhaps be that that same alleged cause is just

PLATONIC CAUSES

121

as effective at making it cold in winter. An intelligent cause, if we could

nd one to place in column 4, would be cosmic nous, which orders everything, including summer heat, for the best. Next, the safe cause would
be, quite simply hotness. And if nally a subtle cause were to be
sought, it would have to be the re travelling from the sun, which is
inalienably hot and therefore necessarily brings heat with it.
As has often been remarked, at least the following three Laws of Causation are being assumed by Plato:
If x causes anything to be F (whose opposite is un-F)
(1) x must not be un-F
(2) xs opposite must not cause anything to be F
(3) x must never cause anything to be un-F
Plato, I have argued, regards as the cause of a given effect whatever thing
in the story it is most appropriate to attach the blame to. How does Plato
decide which item quali es for this? Commentators have often enough
succumbed to the temptation to frame their answer in terms of necessary
or suf cient conditions, but it seems to me that this cannot do justice
to Platos approach. Socrates having bones and sinews is said to be a
necessary condition of his sitting in prison, but explicitly not the cause.
Conversely, Socrates decision that it is best to stay and face the death
penalty is explicitly the cause of his sitting in prison, but cannot be a
suf cient condition of his doing so or his bones and sinews could not
be said, as they are, to constitute a further necessary condition. These considerations at least show that Platonic causes are not straightforwardly
identi able with either necessary or suf cient conditions. But there is a
far more fundamental consideration to add, one which shows that they
cannot be conditions at all. If causes are essentially things, and these
include simple things like the beautiful and intelligence (as distinct
from states of affairs, events etc.), talk of necessary or suf cient conditions
becomes unsatisfactory, since no causal theory could coherently describe
such a thing, as distinct from some fact about the thing like its presence
on the scene, as constituting any kind of condition. Your stabbing me
through the heart may be a suf cient condition of my death, but it is
hard to see what it would even mean to call you a suf cient condition of
my death.
Alternatively, it may be and often is suspected that explanation 7 is
The equation of aitiai with explanations has become almost as popular in the
interpretation of Plato as in that of Aristotle. It represents one of my very few disagreements with Julia Annas, Aristotle on inef cient causes, PQ 32 (1982), 311-26.
7

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the dominant notion motivating Plato that he is requiring a description

under which the cause in question will prove maximally explanatory of
its effect, in the way that to adapt an example from Aristotle it is
more explanatory (though it may be no truer) to call the person responsible for my house a builder than an amateur trombonist. But that this
kind of explanatoriness is not what he is seeking seems clear to me. In no
case does Socrates replace a rejected cause, such as the bones and sinews
rejected as the cause of his sitting, with a redescription of the same item.
Rather, he each time substitutes a reference to a quite different item, in
this case Socrates judgement about what is best. Socrates anyway assumes
that a satisfactory cause must be able to survive such redescription, at least
in the following case: he excludes a head as the cause of someones largeness on the ground that, a head being something small, this causal account
would entail something smalls being the cause of largeness (101a-b). It
seems, then, that causal contexts are referentially transparent, and the aim
of causal inquiry is to identify the thing responsible, no matter under what
description.
Of course it can hardly be denied that nding the cause of something
may often play a crucial part in explaining it. My warning is against taking Platonic causes to have a primarily epistemological function of the
kind outlined above. If I am right, they constitute less an epistemological
than an ontological category. Platos approach is to sift through the items
that play a part in the story, and to ask which among them has some characteristic which made it all along such as to bring about the effect in question. Bones and sinews (see (h) in the chart) were clearly not all along
such as to bring about the effect of sitting in prison, because they are just
as suited to the (presumably) opposite activity of running away from
prison (98e5-99a4). A cushion of air (see (g) in the chart) is, likewise, not
such as to bring about the effect of the earths stability (as Anaxagoras
and others thought), because, we may take Socrates to mean, there is nothing about air as such to make it more suitable for holding things up than
for doing the opposite, letting them fall. These are applications of Law 3.
Similarly (see (d) in the chart), on Law 2, if I am holding one piece of
wood and pick up another, addition cannot be named as the cause of my
now holding two pieces of wood in my hand. Addition may have led to
Cf. also Vlastos, art. cit. A more nuanced account is offered by Gail Fine, Forms as
causes: Plato and Aristotle, in A. Graeser (ed.), Mathematics and Metaphysics in
Aristotle (Bern and Stuttgart 1987), 69-112, who brings out ways in which cause and
explanation may overlap.

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the doubling on this occasion, but it does not follow that it is its nature
to produce 2, when its (supposed) opposite, division, is just as effective
at producing the same result: I could simply have broken the rst piece
of wood in two. That is, re ection about its opposite reveals that there
cannot be anything about addition as such that links it to the effect in
question.
If, then, Plato is looking for something which was all along such as to
produce the effect F-ness, it may be hard for him to see what it could ever
be about the thing that pointed towards that outcome, if not the things
being itself in its own nature F. At least, it is not hard to illustrate such
a principle, provided that you select your examples carefully. To take
Platos own paradigmatic case from later on in the Phaedo, re by its
presence can only make things hot, never cold, because it is itself by
nature hot. Likewise snow, being by nature cold, can by its presence only
make things cold, and the number three, by being present in a set of
things, can only make them odd because it is itself inalienably odd. These
look like good illustrations of Platos Law 1, that whatever causes something to be F must not itself be un-F, and, equally, of its positive counterpart, the principle that like causes like.8
It is tempting to react with counterexamples.9 Must the cause of someones death be itself dead? Will a court convict you of my murder only
if you were yourself dead at the time I died? Obviously not, but a Platonic
theory of causation might still survive the challenge, so long as it speci es
carefully exactly what item is causing what. The jury, in deciding that you
are guilty (atiow) of my death, may strictly speaking mean that you are a
murderous person who can therefore be held responsible for, or the cause
of, the murderous act a causal analysis which does appear to obey
Platonic principles. As for my death itself, well, perhaps the murderous
act is not strictly its cause. Perhaps it has no cause at all, beyond a safe
formal cause, the onset of death and the concurrent departure of the soul,
taking life with it.
This approach is sometimes known as the transmission theory of causation. In a case like that of heat the name makes easy sense: you can
be made hot only by a hot thing, because nothing else has heat to transmit to you. The same might be said of a very different application of the

For an impressive defence of this principle, see S. Makin, An ancient principle

about causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1990-1), 135-52.
9
This type of reaction is well articulated by D. Bostock, Platos Phaedo (Oxford
1986), p. 155.

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same law, when in the Meno Socrates apologises for his numbing effect
on his interlocutor by remarking It is because I myself above all am
at a loss that I cause others too to be at a loss.10 It is easy to think of
Socratic dialectic as the device by which he transmits his puzzlement to
others. Even in the simple case where a murderous act is attributable to
a murderous person, while there is no use for a causal stage in which the
murderousness is transmitted from the agent to the act, as if the act were
already there awaiting the conferment of this property, we might still say,
more loosely, that decision-making is the process by which you transmit
your character to your behaviour. But we must be careful. To insist too
strongly on transmission as a distinct stage in the causal process threatens
to dilute the immediacy and transparency of the cause-effect relation.
When we have accounted for the murderous act by pointing to the murderous person, we have already said all that there is to say about where
the actual responsibility lies. That is why, as we saw earlier, Plato does
not include in the irreducible kernel of a causal statement the process by
which the cause acts. How the murderousness was transmitted is no more
important to a causal account than it was at Phaedo 100d3-e3 to establish whether it is by sharing, presence or whatever that the Beautiful
comes to make things beautiful.
There is nothing altogether absurd in the prospect of learning to reform
our causal language so as obey Platos strictures. And if he can persuade
us that all genuine causal relations have this transparency and immediacy,
why should we object? It may even help us to see why, in cases of accidental killing, we should not hold the unfortunate perpetrator responsible
at all: there is simply no properly causal link between the agents character and the act, in the way that there is when someone elses murderous
character becomes the cause of a murderous act.
An apparent further attraction of adhering to so strict a notion of cause
is the prospect of circumventing the danger, highlighted by Hume, that
so-called causal relations will prove to be nothing more than regular conjunctions. One central thrust of Platos account is that reference to mere
situational correlations, like that of air and aether with the earths original formation, or that of Socrates bones and sinews with his sitting, is a
hopelessly inadequate way of locating a cause-effect relation. In all such
cases, the actual causality cannot be displayed, and we are being asked
simply to take it on trust. Only in causal relations of the kind which Plato
10

Meno 80c9-d1, pantw mllon atw porn otvw ka tow llouw poi

poren.

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endorses is the actual nature of the causing conceptually self-evident.

Quite apart from the Humean question, a Platonic approach promises
to save us from the sheer arbitrariness or subjectivity which the task of
singling out a cause regularly seems to import. What caused my death?
Was it you? Was it your action? Was it your gun, or your ring your gun?
Or was it the rupture of my heart, as a forensic scientist is more likely to
claim? Or again, was it reckless provocation on my part, your deprived
childhood, your callous pursuit of your own ends, the in uence of television, or any of a thousand other items which various sectional interests
may choose to privilege as the cause? Platonic causation eliminates all
these impostors at a stroke.11
It is inadequate, then, to object on the ground that Platos causal theory cannot account for all the relations which we consider causal. Maybe,
after all, they are not genuinely causal. But can it, at least, deal adequately
with all the cases that he himself considers causal? What about Socrates
own expressed ideal of teleological causation? In the passage about the
causes of his sitting in prison, he is rejecting material causes in favour
of intelligent, goal-directed causes: the primary reason for his sitting
in prison is his judgement that it is better for him not to escape. He
adds that he would dearly love to learn how to establish similar causes
for the arrangement of the cosmos, showing how a divine Intelligence
(nous) ordered it as it is because it judged that this was the best way for
things to be.
Since Socrates confesses that he has been unable to discover an adequate account of such causes, we should not expect, from his own informal sketch of the idea, to learn much about how they might be coherently
formulated. Plato is acknowledging that cosmology was not a discipline
to which his master made any direct contribution. But it is equally clear
that Plato himself12 regards teleological cosmology as a proper philosophical project. How, then, does he himself envisage this kind of cause?
How, in particular, can intelligent or teleological causes even obey Platos
own austere causal principles? For example, if Intelligence is the cause of
11

I am grateful to Christopher Shields for impressing on me the point made in this

paragraph.
12
In Teleology and myth in the Phaedo, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 5 (1990), 359-83, and The dramatis personae of
Platos Phaedo, in T.J. Smiley (ed.), Philosophical Dialogues: Plato, Hume and
Wittgenstein (Oxford 1995), 1-26, I have argued that to understand the Phaedos teleological programme we must distinguish Platos own authorial voice from the voice
of his character Socrates.

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everything, then isnt it (in de ance of Causal Law 3) the cause of opposite effects both heat in summer and cold in winter, both light in the
day and darkness at night?
I dont think so. If Plato wants Intelligence to be the cause of all things,
that will mean all good things. Intelligence is intrinsically good, therefore
in so far as it acts upon things it can only make them good. As Socrates
emphasises (98a-b), to attribute something to the agency of an intelligence
just is to say why it is best that it should be the way it is. This is in fact
a causal thesis almost explicitly maintained in book II of the Republic
(379b-c), where Socrates argues that, since god is intrinsically good, he
is the cause, not of everything, but only of good things. Intelligence invariably aims for the good, and is therefore causally ef cacious only when it
succeeds in bringing about a good state of affairs. (If it is wondered why
Intelligence should be absolved of being the cause of its own omissions,
failures or mistakes, Platos causal principles again step in with the answer. Intelligence, being good and essentially aiming for the good, is
simply not causally correlated in the right way to a bad outcome. This is
little more than a development, on a cosmic scale, of the Socratic paradox
that no one does wrong willingly, because intelligence always aims for
the good and therefore never intends its bad results.)13
Thus Platos teleological project is one of investigating, not everything
about the world, but its goodness. However, the goodness which affects it
has enormous causal powers. For example (see (g) in the chart), Socrates
says at 99b-c, it is absurd of the natural philosophers to attribute the
earths stable position in the cosmos to its resting on, say, a cushion of
air, as if air could compete with the power of the good and the binding
in holding the whole arrangement together. He means, I think, that the
good has this power in virtue of being the goal governing all the activities
of the divine Intelligence. It is precisely because it is good for the earth
to be stable that the divine Intelligence can be relied on to nd a way to
make it so.
Platonic teleology, then, can be read as fully adhering to the strict
Platonic notion of a cause. Teleological causation is from start to nish a
matter of the good bringing about the good. It is, in short, a special appli13
The teleological explanation of Socrates sitting in prison is (98e) that since (a)
it has seemed better to the Athenians to condemn me, for this reason (b) it has seemed
to me too in my turn better to sit here, and more just to stay and face whatever penalty
they impose. Here we might I suppose take it that the bad situation (a) is a failure
of intelligence (this time human intelligence), the morally good act (b) a success of
intelligence, in achieving the good that it invariably aims for.

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cation of the formal causation to which Socrates turns in his famous

Second Voyage (Phd. 99c-102a), with its safe causal story that it
is the F which causes F things to be F. What it may be thought to anticipate in addition is subtle causation of the kind canvassed at 105b-c:
intelligence, being intrinsically good, always imports goodness by its presence, just as re, being intrinsically hot, always by its presence makes
things hot.
II. Formal causes
Platos formal causes have received a largely bad press. If you want to
know what makes a sunset beautiful, it may seem quite unhelpful to be
told Because of the beautiful. Can these formal causes be other than
vacuous?
They can. There is an enormous value in knowing that the sunset is
beautiful because of the beautiful and not because of, say, its colour. Only
when you know what the genuine cause is do you know what it is that
you have to investigate. If you want to understand what makes sunsets
beautiful, dont be sidetracked into investigating the nature of colours.
Investigate what the beautiful is in other words, seek to establish the
essence of the beautiful by means of a de nition. Likewise, more ambitiously, if you want to understand the worlds goodness, forget about air,
aether and the like and nd out what goodness is. You will then be able
to trace a causal chain from the nature of the Good, through the inherent
goodness of the divine intellect, down to the goodness of the worlds individual features. But only someone who grasped the Platonic causal principles could hope to carry this out.
One di f culty about envisaging this intellectual process is that the
Phaedo itself does not explicitly supply working de nitions for any of the
Forms that it considers, and this has sometimes fostered the impression
that there is nothing more to formal causal analysis than the utterly trivial
undertaking of naming the formal cause: This is F because of F-ness.
However, not only does Socrates indicate, if cryptically, at 101d that the
Form that has been posited will eventually need to be de ned, but I am
also convinced that there is at any rate one simple trio of interdependent
Forms, central to his illustrations of formal causation, whose de nitions
Plato assumes all his readers already to know. This is the trio large-equalsmall.14 At 74b Simmias unhesitatingly agrees that we, i.e. at the very
14

For these as a trio, cf. 75c9, t son ka t mezon ka t latton And in the

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least all those present, know what the equal itself is.15 And when we get to
the account of immanent largeness and smallness at 102a-103a, Socrates
sounds as if he is in fact assuming as known the de nitions of largeness
and smallness later used at Parmenides 150c-d (and perhaps implicit at
Hp.Ma. 294b). Largeness is the capacity to exceed (dnamiw to perxein),
smallness the capacity to be exceeded (dnamiw to perxesyai); in
which case, equality must presumably be the capacity neither to exceed
nor be exceeded.
It is, I suspect, because largeness is a Form which we are all expected
to know 16 that Plato repeatedly invokes it to illustrate formal causation.
This is true not only in the Phaedo, but also, as I shall now argue, in that
classic passage of the Parmenides, the Third Man Argument (132a-b).
I think it is for the following sort of reason that you believe each Form is one
thing. When it seems to you that there are many particular large things, perhaps
it seems to you, as you look onto them all, that there is one Form, the same one,
and for this reason you judge the Large to be one.
What you say is true, replied Socrates.
But what about the Large itself and the other large things? If you look onto
them all in the same way with your soul, wont a single Large appear again,
because of which () all these appear large?
Apparently.
In that case another Form of Largeness will put in an appearance, generated
over and above Largeness itself and the things which participate in it. And in
addition to all of these again a further one, because of which () all of them will
be large. And you will no longer have each of the Forms as single, but as in nite
in number.

To oversimply somewhat, Parmenides argument runs as follows. A Form

is supposed to be that entity in virtue of which a set of things share a
property: all F things are F in virtue of the single Form, F-ness. This is
sometimes called the One-over-Many principle. To say that Forms are
separate entails that this Form, F-ness, is something over and above the

Phaedo larger and large are interchangeable cf. 102d-103a for reasons which
the de nition of large (see immediately below) will make obvious.
15
I therefore agree with Dominic Scott, Recollection and Experience (Cambridge
1995), 67-8, that the later indication (76b-c) that perhaps no one but Socrates knows
the Forms re ects the fact that they are by now talking about the entire range of Forms,
including the problematic goodness, beauty etc.
16
That largeness is one of the easy Forms (by contrast with goodness, beauty
etc.) is con rmed by Meno 72c-e, where, by contrast with the case of goodness (ret),
it is a matter of common agreement that one and the same largeness makes all large
things large.

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set of F things. But, given also that the Form F-ness is itself taken to be
F Beauty is beautiful, for example positing this Form merely adds one
further F thing to the list, thus generating a new, expanded set of F things,
for which we will have to posit a further Form, F-ness 1. And the same reasoning will generate a yet further Form, F-ness 2. And so on ad in nitum.
Gregory Vlastos17 set the terms for modern discusssions of the Third
Man Argument (TMA) by isolating two controversial premises. Stripped
down, these are:
Self-predication (SP): F-ness is F
Non-identity (NI): None of the F things is identical with F-ness
Since it has proved hard if not impossible to absolve Plato of being
somehow committed to SP,18 and since NI (even when heavily disguised)
looks like a direct negation of SP, there must remain a doubt about
whether we have really understood NI. My hope is to show that, provided
we keep in sight Platos notion of formal causation, a highly plausible
understanding of NI can be found.
It may be helpful to start from a retrospective view of the TMA.
Immediately following it, Socrates retreats to the proposal that Forms
are thoughts located exclusively in our souls (132b). He expresses his
con dence and is not challenged on the point by Parmenides that if
Forms were thoughts the Third Man regress would be avoided. Why
so? If Largeness is a thought (call it conceptual Largeness), it is nonidentical with the particular largenesses over which it stands. Then what
links these particular largenesses and conceptual Largeness itself? Why
wont there be a new thought, conceptual Largeness 1, which links this
new set of largenesses? On the reasonable assumption that no thought
can include itself within its own scope, the thought which is generated by
surveying a set of things which include conceptual Largeness could not
itself be conceptual Largeness. And then we would be confronted with
the TMA all over again. Clearly then we must construe either the TMA
or the Form-thought equivalence so as to make the latter less vulnerable
to the regress attack.
Originally in G. Vlastos, The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides, Philosophical Review 63 (1954), 319-49, repr. in R.E. Allen (ed.), Studies in Platos Metaphysics (London 1965).
18
As Dorothea Frede points out in The nal proof of the immortality of the soul
in Platos Phaedo 102a-107a, Phronesis 23 (1978), 24-41, SP even follows directly
from the doctrine that Forms are causes combined with the causal principle that what
makes things F must itself be F.
17

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I suggest that this requires the following approach. In the TMA, Parmenides generates his second form of Largeness by urging upon Socrates
that he (Socrates) looks with his soul onto the Form plus the particulars
that fall under it and notices what common Form links them all. That is
why Socrates, in the Form-thought passage, responds by explicitly placing
the Form itself within the soul. There it cannot be looked onto by the
soul in the way that the other large things can, and no second Form will
be generated. The One over Many principle was designed to correlate a
set of objective items accessed by the mind; if the Form proves instead to
be subjective, it will cease to be one of the items taken in by the survey.
We can now see why Plato, in anticipation of this later response, made
Parmenides start out in the TMA by emphasising the objective, extramental status of Forms. And what better way to substantiate this than by
bringing out their objective role as causes: the Form Largeness is actually
what makes large things large. That is a role which it could scarcely perform if it were a mere human thought.
That the Form has this causal function is in fact explicitly brought
out twice in the TMA by the causal dative, which should be familiar to
readers of the Phaedo as one of Platos standard locutions for a cause,
and as the standard locution for a formal cause (as in t kal pnta t
kal kal, Phd. 100e, etc.). Indeed, the same causal dative has featured
in Parmenides immediately preceding argument, on the absurdity of
making something relatively small viz. a part of Largeness or Equality
the cause of a particular things being large or equal (131c-d, cf. above
p. 000 ). It will make a huge difference if we start by noticing this simple
terminological point.19 According to the TMA, the discovery of a Form,
Largeness, leads to the addition of Largeness 1, because of which ()
Largeness and the other large things are large; and that in turn likewise
leads to the addition of Largeness 2, because of which Largeness 1 and
the other large things are large.
19

The terminological point has been overlooked by the classic literature on the
TMA. However, since I rst wrote the above, the same point has been made by
K.-C. Chang in his 1995 Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation, The role of the Timaeus in
the development of Platos theory of Forms, and by Mary-Louise Gill in M.L. Gill
and P. Ryan (ed. and trans.), Plato, Parmenides (Indianapolis and Cambridge 1996),
pp. 34-6. I have also learned that a similar point was developed at some length by
Alexander Nehamas in his 1971 Princeton doctoral dissertation, Predication and the
theory of forms in the Phaedo, which, however, I have not seen. For a comparably
causal reading of the Likeness regress in the Parmenides, cf. S. Waterlow, The Third
Mans contribution to Platos paradigmatism, Mind 91 (1982), 339-57.

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The attraction of this reading is, I hope, that it offers an immediately

plausible interpretation of the TMA. If we pay proper attention to the
causal language, we will be well placed to explain how the regress is
generated.
We still need versions of SP and NI in order to follow the argument.
However, SP, the puzzling assumption that e.g. Largeness is large, can for
the purposes of the argument be treated as meaning no more than that
Largeness, the Form, is itself a largeness,20 albeit a rather special one. The
whole argument can, for our present convenience, be read as one about
the interrelations of a series of largenesses, or cases of largeness, starting
with the individual largenesses (i.e. individual capacities to exceed) of a
set of particular objects. My present aim is not to solve the problem of
Self-Predication, but temporarily to disarm it in order to concentrate instead on the dangers posed by Non-Identity, to which I now turn.
With the help of the causal analysis, we are in a position to rewrite NI
as a new,21 but also I hope entirely credible, premise:
NI*: No cause is identical with its own effect
NI* has many merits. It seems an obvious intuitive truth. It is explicitly
stated (with regard to the causes of becoming) as a law at Philebus 27a and
Hippias Major 297c1-2. Above all, it is arguably a principle which Plato
had already acknowledged with regard to the causal role of Forms: at
Phaedo 100c he was presumably recognising that F-ness could not be the
cause of its own F-ness when he wrote: If anything is beautiful, other
than the Beautiful itself, it is beautiful through no other cause than that
it participates in that Beautiful.22
The argument can now run as follows. Take, for convenience, a set of
three large things, plus Largeness itself, which stands over them. You now
have four largenesses the largenesses of the three large things, and
Largeness itself. That these are four of a kind, and therefore in need of a
Cf. Phd. 102d-e, where our individual capacity to exceed may be called interchangeably the large in us and the largeness in us.
21
The NI premise, thus formulated, has much in common with the version offered
by Gail Fine, On Ideas (Oxford 1993), p. 206, Nothing is F in virtue of itself . What
I am proposing to add is the speci cally causal analysis.
22
Technically he could mean that it is the cause of its own beauty, although not
by being participated in by itself; but as I remarked in Part I, in the immediate sequel
he asserts that the nature of this participation relation is unimportant to his causal
thesis, which he simpli es so as to omit it: It is because of the beautiful that beautiful things are beautiful.
20

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unitary causal account, is con rmed by the fact that they all satisfy the
same de nition which is probably, as we have seen, the capacity to
exceed. So what causes them all to be largenesses? Not Largeness itself,
since then it would be causing not only other largenesses but also itself,
in contravention of NI*. There is therefore a fth Largeness which makes
the rst four largenesses largenesses. But this new Largeness satis es the
same de nition as the other four largenesses, yielding a set of ve largenesses, for which a yet further cause must be sought. And so on ad
in nitum.
Looking back on the structure of the argument, we may note that no
version of NI was, or in the context needed to be, invoked as justifying
the initial separation of Largeness from individual largenesses: that Forms
are separate from the things that participate in them was Socrates hypothesis, already for some time under active investigation by Parmenides.
But as soon as Parmenides came to the second step, and needed an argument for the separation of Largeness 1, it was the causal principle NI*
that he reached for.
This might lead us to re ect that NI*, the separation of cause from
effect, would in fact constitute an equally powerful ground for the original
Platonic separation of the Form Largeness from its effects, such individual
largenesses as yours and mine. Even before he separated the Forms as
transcendent entities, Plato was already speaking of them as the causes of
their own instantiations (e.g. Euthyphro 6d-e, Meno 72c). Perhaps then
NI* should be added to the motives which we standardly adduce for that
single most revolutionary development in Platos metaphysics, his postulation of separated Forms.23
Christs College, Cambridge

At the very least, NI* yields Forms which are non-identical with their instances.
How Plato gets from this to independently existing Forms (which I take to be intended
by the notion of separation), is a problematic issue (cf. G. Fine, Separation, OSAP
2 (1984), 31-87). But NI* would do much to bridge that gap, because causes are naturally held to be not merely non-identical with their effects but also temporally and/or
ontologically prior to them.
My thanks for comments on previous drafts supplied by audiences at Geneva,
Lille, Cambridge, Princeton, Milan, Columbia, Cornell, London and Shef eld, and
to Christopher Shields, Verity Harte, Gail Fine, Barrie Fleet, Robert Wardy, Voula
Tsouna and Chris Bobonich for further written comments.
23