Parmenides

Abstract

Active in the earlier part of the 5th century bce, Parmenides of Elea is Presocratic philosophy’s most challenging and profound thinker. His reputation rests on the fragmentary remains of a hexameter poem in which he presents a detailed account of his mystical journey to the abode of a goddess who says she will provide him instruction that will come in two major phases (fr. 1). In the first phase she describes how he may direct his understanding along “the path of conviction” to apprehend “true reality” (fr. 2); she explains how she will lead him along this path and how he must avoid the path mortals ordinarily follow in their quest for understanding (frs. 6–7); and she demonstrates in an elaborate metaphysical deduction that “What Is,” or true reality, is “ungenerated and deathless, whole and uniform, and still and perfect” (fr. 8). In the second phase of her revelation, which she describes as “the notions of mortals, in which there is no genuine trustworthiness,” she presents a cosmology broadly in the tradition of early Greek cosmological accounts, though with important innovations such as its positing of two basic principles, light and night; its view of the moon as shining with a reflected light; and its identification of the earth as spherical in shape. Already in Antiquity there was fundamental disagreement and a good deal of confusion about the fundamental upshot of Parmenides’s message, occasioned to no small degree by the novelty and obscurity of his own doctrine but also by the fact that Zeno of Elea came to be seen as his pupil and by the deformations of his doctrine by Melissus of Samos, Gorgias of Leontini, and certain other sophists. Basic disagreement continues today about whether he was, in fact, a monist and, if so, what type of monist he was; about whether he was motivated by the perceived inadequacies of the principles of earlier Presocratic cosmologies or by more purely logical concerns; and about whether his metaphysics committed him to regarding the changing world of everyday experience as unreal or merely as unsuitable as an object for understanding of the sort revealed to him by the goddess. As difficult as it may be, achieving a proper understanding of Parmenides’s thought is an important task, since Parmenides is normally regarded, in one way or another, as the pivotal figure in the history of early Greek philosophy, and, in any case, he is certainly among its most significant figures.