Plato, Theaetetus, section 205a

Home Collections/Texts Perseus Catalog Research Grants Open Source About Help

Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:

This text is part of:

Greek and Roman Materials

Search the Perseus Catalog for:

View text chunked by:

text : page
text : section

Table of Contents:

view as XML

[205a]

Socrates
You are putting up a brave fight, Theaetetus. But is not the all precisely that of which nothing is wanting?

Theaetetus
Necessarily.

Socrates
And is not just this same thing, from which nothing whatsoever is lacking, a whole? For that from which anything is lacking is neither a whole nor all, which have become identical simultaneously and for the same reason.

Theaetetus
I think now that there is no difference between all and whole.

Socrates
We were saying, were we not, that if there are parts of anything, the whole and all of it will be all the parts?

Theaetetus
Certainly.

Socrates
Once more, then, as I was trying to say just now, if the syllable is not the letters, does it not follow necessarily

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

view as XML

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.