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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: necessary, and for this he is paving the way.
In a similar spirit he criticizes the Eleatic doctrine of Being, not
intending to deny Ontology, but showing that the old Eleatic notion, and
the very name 'Being,' is unable to maintain itself against the subtleties
of the Megarians. He did not mean to say that Being or Substance had no
existence, but he is preparing for the development of his later view, that
ideas were capable of relation. The fact that contradictory consequences
follow from the existence or non-existence of one or many, does not prove
that they have or have not existence, but rather that some different mode
of conceiving them is required. Parmenides may still have thought that
'Being was,' just as Kant would have asserted the existence of 'things in
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