Parmenides

I am working on this article.—Keisuke Noda 18:35, 25 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Parmenides of Elea (5th century B.C.E.) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He is reported to have been a student of Xenophanes. He is one of the most significant of the pre-Socratic philosophers. He argued that the every-day perception of reality of the physical world (the "Way of Seeming") is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is 'One Being' (the "Way of Truth"): an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole.

He was the founder of the Eleatic school, which also included Zeno of Elea and Melissus.

When one says that Parmenides "argued" something, one cannot think about "argue" in the modern sense. Parmenides was a prophet, magician and healer (just like Pythagoras, Empedocles and many others), and his philosophy is presented in verse, through mythology and obscure mystic visions. The philosophy he argued was, he says, given to him by the Goddess of the underworld (Tartaros):

Welcome, youth, who come attended by immortal charioteers and mares which bear you on your journey to our dwelling. For it is no evil fate that has set you to travel on this road, far from the beaten paths of men, but right and justice. It is meet that you learn all things - both the unshakable heart of well-rounded truth and the opinions of mortals in which there is not true belief.

Under 'way of seeming', in the same work, he set out a contrasting but more conventional view of the world, thereby becoming an early exponent of the duality of appearance and reality. For him and his pupils the phenomena of movement and change are simply appearances of a static, eternal reality.

In Plato's dialogue Parmenides the Eleatic philosopher and Socrates argue about dialectic. In the Theaetetus, Socrates says that Parmenides alone among the wise (Protagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Epicharmus, and Homer) denied that everything is change and motion.

Metaphysics

His work On Nature exists only in fragments and is made up of two parts as well as an introductory discourse. The Way of Truth discusses that which is real and the Way of Seeming discusses that which is illusory. Under the Way of Truth, he stated that there are two ways of inquiry: that it is, that it is not. He said that the latter argument is never feasible because nothing can not be and be an object of speech and thought:

For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are.

Thinking and the thought that it is are the same; for you will not find thought apart from what is, in relation to which it is uttered.

For thought and being are the same.

It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not.

Helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts; they are carried along deaf and blind alike, dazed, beasts without judgment, convinced that to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and that the road of all things is a backward-turning one.

Furthermore, he implied that it could not have "come into being" because "nothing comes from nothing."

Moreover he argued that movement was impossible because it requires moving into "the void", and Parmenides identified "the void" with nothing, and therefore (by definition) it does not exist. That which does exist is The Parmenidean One which is timeless, uniform, and unchanging:

How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown.

Nor was [it] once, nor will [it] be, since [it] is, now, all together, / One, continuous; for what coming-to-be of it will you seek? / In what way, whence, did [it] grow? Neither from what-is-not shall I allow / You to say or think; for it is not to be said or thought / That [it] is not. And what need could have impelled it to grow / Later or sooner, if it began from nothing? Thus [it] must either be completely or not at all.

[What exists] is now, all at once, one and continuous... Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is.

And it is all one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again.

Works

• On Nature (written between 480 and 470 B.C.E.) [1]

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Melchert, Norman (2002). The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. McGraw Hill. ISBN 0195175107.

External Links

• Parmenides, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Lecture Notes: Parmenides", Mark Cohen, University of Washighton
• Parmenides' Way of Truth

Philosophy and religion

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