  For some, Parmenides’ criticisms are no more than a “record of honest perplexity” (see Vlastos (1954, 343); Gill (1996; 2012); Allen (1997)). On this view, Plato’s intention was simply to put forward difficulties for the theory of forms that he himself did not, at least at the time he wrote the dialogue, see a way to resolve. The main problem for this interpretation is that, after having laid out his criticisms of the theory, Parmenides says that it should be possible for a “very gifted man” to defend the existence of the forms, and thereby explain the possibility of dialectic, through a method of training that Parmenides himself goes on to instantiate in the second part of the dialogue.