..."goaded perhaps by Parmenides". Preliminaries to a Platonic Problem

Starting with Plato Davidson traces the problem throughout the history of Western philosophy. The present contribution is, however, not concerned with the unfolding of this issue. Taking up a hint of Davidson's it looks into the opposite direction.

A short overview of the literature on Parmenides' fragment B2 will be given, followed by a proposal to supplement the multiple problems arising from a philological approach by a reconstruction of the underlying issue within a standard framework of analytic philosophy. Secondly, given this understanding, a Parmenideian tableaux will be put forward and compared to our present understanding of elementary predicate logic. This will provide the basis for the concluding discussion of Plato's characteristic transformation of Parmenides' dictum into the bundle of arguments that give rise to the problem of the unity of propositions.