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Full Idea
It is impossible for anything to be like an absolute idea, because a third idea will appear to make them alike, and if that is like anything, it will lead to another idea, and so on.
Gist of Idea
Nothing can be like an absolute idea, because a third idea intervenes to make them alike (leading to a regress)
Source
Plato (Parmenides [c.364 BCE], 133a)
Book Ref
Plato: 'Plato IV (Cratylus,Parmenides,Hippias Maj, Min)', ed/tr. Fowler,H.N. [Harvard Loeb 1926], p.221
| 214 | If absolute greatness and great things are seen as the same, another thing appears which makes them seem great [Plato] |
| 217 | Nothing can be like an absolute idea, because a third idea intervenes to make them alike (leading to a regress) [Plato] |
| 190 | If asked whether justice itself is just or unjust, you would have to say that it is just [Plato] |
| 563 | If gods are like men, they are just eternal men; similarly, Forms must differ from particulars [Aristotle on Plato] |
| 9483 | Forms have to be their own paradigms, which seems to fuse the paradigm and the copy [Aristotle] |
| 4442 | Most thinkers now reject self-predication (whiteness is NOT white) so there is no Third Man problem [Armstrong] |