 It has been debated at great length amongst the Plato scholars whether the Third Man Argument is to be understood as a metaphysical or as an epistemic argument, an argument about the postulated entities or an argument about what is involved in our knowledge of them. (For an entry point on literature concerning the Third Man Argument, as well as the dialogue more broadly see SEP’s entry Plato’s Parmenides). Similarly, there has been much disagreement about which of the theses that underlie the TMA Plato was willing to give up in order to avoid the regress. To a modern reader the “self-partaking” premise seems like an obvious candidate, since it is quite odd to think that the form of largeness is itself large, the form of smallness itself small, etc.