. . . goaded perhaps by Parmenides Preliminaries to a Platonic Problem

Donald Davidson, in his Truth and Predication, suggests that Plato's concern with gluing together subject and predicate in assertive sentences might be traced back to Parmenides. Taking his lead this paper discusses the connection, proceeding in three steps. A short overview of the literature on Parmenides' fragment B2 will be given and a Davidsonian move to reduce the complexity of the hermeneutical situation will be proposed. Secondly, given this reduction, a Parmenideian tableaux will be put forward and compared to our present understanding of elementary propositional and predicate logic. This will provide the basis for the concluding discussion of Plato's characteristic transformation of Parmenides' dictum into the bundle of arguments that give rise to the problem of the unity of propositions.