The GreatestAporiain theParmenides(133b-134e) and the Reciprocity ofProsRelations

ABSTRACT The extant attempts in the literature to refute the greatest difficulty argument in theParmenideshave focused on denying the parallelism between theprosrelations among Forms and those among particulars. However, these attempts are unsatisfactory, for the argument can reach its conclusion that we cannot know any Forms without relying on this parallelism. I argue that a more effective strategy is to deny the more essential premise that the knowledge-object relation is aprosrelation. This premise is false becauseprosrelations require definitional and ontological codependence between the relata, and the knowledge-object relation does not satisfy this reciprocity condition.