Abstract
How shall we read those perplexing sentences Justice is just, Beauty is beautiful, and like which have occasioned so much controversy in discussions of Plato's metaphysics in recent decades? Shall we assume that they are ordinary predications, asserting their predicate-term of Form named by subject-term? Or shall we hold, more charitably, that they are identities?2 Or should we, as charitably, opt for a third reading which understands them to assert their predicate not of Form but of its instances, if any?3 In an important paper,4 remarkable for boldness of its attack on fundamental problems of Platonic ontology, Professor Alexander Nehamas puts forward a formal redefinition of self-predication which is meant to be a fourth way of reading such sentences in Plato, distinct from each of three I have just set forth.5 He proposes the following analysis of self-predication:
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