Plato's arguments against conceptualism

Abstract

Plato’s Parmenides confronts us with a curious, unusual situation: The Socrates that we know only all too well as the white bearded sagacious old man appears as a young student. Indeed, a student defending his innovative theory of the Forms against the severe, though not eristic criticism of the old Eleatic Parmenides. In the course of pleading his case before the old man, he advances the thesis that Forms could only be thoughts that originate nowhere else but in souls or minds1. This is commonly identified with a conceptualist interpretation of the Forms, namely that Forms or universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial realit.