"Apolloni's book is a wonderful gift for Plato scholars... I think that part of the beauty of Apolloni's interpretation is precisely its contrast between Form, as an Equal itself or a tall itself, and the contextually embedded character of our experience, at least with respect to relative terms, or incomplete predicates."--Vick Harper, St. Olaf College

Plato believes in the existence of Forms—eternal models or exemplars of which objects in our world in time and space are copies, and his Theory of Forms lies at the center of his philosophy. But according to the common wisdom, Plato raised the Third Man objection against his own Theory of Forms in the Parmenides. According to this objection, each Form is supposed to have the very characteristic it is supposed to be (called by the scholars “The Self-Predication Assumption”), and this leads to an infinite regress of each Form (the Third Man Argument). This book defends the view that a mysterious plural phrase at Phaedo 74 shows that the Self-Predication Assumption is both plausible and leads to no infinite regress of Forms. The Self-Predication Assumption in Plato is an essential resource for scholars, specialists, and students with an interest in ancient philosophy and classics.

"Apolloni’s dense and well-documented study of this question in the contemporary secondary literature aims to shows that Plato has a way to avoid embracing self-predication such that it does not threaten the coherence of a theory of separate Forms. Along the way, he offers extensive treatment of the contemporary literature regarding self- predication and related matters. A graduate student wishing for an efficient means of getting up to speed on the main lines of the more than half a century of interpretation generated by Gregory Vlastos’s famous 1954 article would be well served by this book." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review