Second Response to Marshall Gillis: The Elimination of the Form of Rest Eric Nash, Texas A&M University In his paper, “The Blending of Change and Rest”, Marshall Gilles argues that the Platonic forms of Change and Rest are capable of blending together. Further, they are able to blend in such a way that preserved their essential natures. This position has been rejected up until now in the literature because of a standard ‘unstoppable force meets unmovable object’ paradox — Change and Rest cannot mix together, because doing so makes them no longer ‘Change’ and ‘Rest’ respectively. Gilles claims, though, that there exists a kind of changes which an object of knowledge can undergo without its essential characteristics being altered, namely, Cambridge change. In this paper I will analyze the nature of Plato’s five major forms, explain Gille’s argument for blending, express my concern over the danger Gilles’s argument poses for eliminating the Form of Rest altogether, and then finally offer some possible remedies to this problem. In the Sophist, Plato claims that there are five major forms: Being, Sameness, Difference, Change, and Rest. They are the most important of the Forms, because all forms ‘participate’ in them. For any thing to exist implies that it will participate in these five megista genê-ville. However, Change and Rest are unique in reference to the other three. For any form X, if X exists then it logically entails that it participates in Being (because it is rather than is not), Sameness (because it is like itself), and Difference (because it is not any other form). X does not have these properties because it is a part of X’s intrinsic characters, but because X, as we say, participates in the Forms from which these traits comes. For example, Sameness is different from Rest because both Forms exist, not because ‘difference’ is a part of Sameness’s makeup. While Change and Rest share in these three Forms, no other sensible particular shares in Change and Rest permanently or simultaneously. If it were possible for any one thing to simultaneously participate in Change and Rest then we come to the previously mentioned paradox. Meanwhile, the nature of reality allows for no sensible particular to permanently stay in states of either Change or Rest. Moreover, no Forms participate in Change or Rest at all, because “Forms…are purely intelligible entities” (Leah 2012); they are changeless causes. Consider the Form of Beauty, the Form structures all beautiful sensible particulars and so causes them to possess the attribute of beauty. If this form were to change,
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