Parmenides

Introduction

Parmenides of Elea is the Pre-Socratic philosopher whose poem On Nature (early fifth century BCE) is the founding statement of Western metaphysics. The poem argued that being is one, eternal, indivisible, and unchanging — the world of plural, changing beings that ordinary experience presents is illusion — and presented this conclusion as the necessary result of strict deductive reasoning from the principle that what is, is and cannot not be.

The Parmenidean argument forced every subsequent Greek philosopher to respond. The pluralist Pre-Socratics (Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the atomists) developed their cosmologies as attempts to preserve the appearance of plural and changing beings within the constraints Parmenides had established. Plato's dialogue Parmenides engages the older philosopher with explicit reverence and works through the implications of the Eleatic position for the theory of Forms. Aristotle's account of substance, change, and the categories was developed against the Parmenidean denial of change. The contemporary engagement with Parmenides through the work of G. E. L. Owen, Patricia Curd, John Palmer, and Néstor-Luis Cordero continues to organize work in ancient philosophy.

Life

Parmenides was born around 515 BCE in Elea (Velia), a Greek colony on the western coast of southern Italy founded by refugees from Phocaea. The biographical record is thin and shaped by later traditions of varying reliability. Diogenes Laertius reports that Parmenides was wealthy, gave laws to his city, and was active in its political life. Plato's dialogue Parmenides presents him as visiting Athens around 450 BCE in his sixties and engaging the young Socrates (a meeting whose historicity is disputed but which provides the canonical literary frame for the engagement between the two figures).

The Eleatic school, of which Parmenides is the founder, includes Zeno of Elea (Parmenides's most famous student, whose paradoxes defended the master's position) and Melissus of Samos (whose extant work develops the Eleatic doctrine in distinct directions).

The poem

Parmenides composed his philosophy in dactylic hexameter — the meter of Homer and Hesiod. The poem On Nature survives in fragments quoted by later authors; substantial portions of the proem and Way of Truth survive, less of the Way of Opinion. The framework of the poem is a journey: a young man (the narrator) is carried by horses to the gates of Day and Night, where an unnamed goddess welcomes him and instructs him in two ways of inquiry.

The two ways are presented in DK B2 (the standard Diels-Kranz fragment numbering): the way of is (the way that what-is, is, and that it is not possible for it not to be); and the way of is not (the way that what-is-not is, and that it is necessary for it not to be). The goddess warns that the second way is not even thinkable — one cannot grasp what is not. A third way, presented later, is the way of the mortals who suppose that being and not-being are both real; this way is to be rejected because it conflates the two ways the goddess had distinguished.

The argument of the Way of Truth draws out the necessary attributes of what-is from the principle that what-is must be and cannot not be. Because what-is cannot have come from what-is-not (which is unthinkable), it must be eternal. Because it cannot pass into what-is-not, it must be imperishable. Because it cannot have parts that are not (or that are in different ways), it must be indivisible and homogeneous. Because change would require being to become what it is not, it must be unchanging. The conclusion: what-is is one, eternal, indivisible, homogeneous, unchanging, and complete — a single sphere of being whose attributes the poem develops in detail.

The Way of Opinion, presented in the surviving fragments only briefly, gives an account of the cosmos as ordinary mortals conceive it. The goddess presents this as the deceptive opinion of mortals to enable the student to engage the ordinary world without being convinced by it. The status of the Way of Opinion is one of the most contested questions in Parmenides scholarship: is it a cosmology Parmenides himself endorsed at some level, or a wholly negative presentation of the mortal error he had refuted?

The argument

The Parmenidean argument can be reconstructed in several ways. The dominant contemporary reading (associated especially with G. E. L. Owen's Eleatic Questions, 1960, and Patricia Curd's The Legacy of Parmenides, 1998) treats the argument as a sustained logical deduction from a small number of premises. The premises: the principle of non-contradiction; the principle that what-is-not cannot be thought or spoken of (the unthinkability premise); the assumption that any account of reality must apply to all of what-is rather than to parts (the predicational monism premise).

From these premises the necessary attributes follow. Change requires that what-is becomes what it was not; but what was not is unthinkable; so change is unthinkable. Plurality requires that what-is be divided into parts that are not other parts; but each part would then be characterized by what it is not; so plurality is unthinkable.

Major recent interpretive frameworks include the predicational monist reading (Curd: Parmenides is committed to predicational monism — the view that any genuinely existing thing must be uniform with respect to its essential predicates — rather than to numerical monism), the modal reading (Palmer: the poem distinguishes three modal categories — necessary being, contingent being, impossibility — and argues that genuine philosophical inquiry must be about necessary being), and the cosmological reading (Cordero: the Way of Opinion is the actual Parmenidean cosmology, with the Way of Truth functioning as a methodological propaedeutic).

Influence

The Parmenidean argument forced every subsequent Greek philosopher to respond. The pluralist Pre-Socratics (Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the atomists Leucippus and Democritus) developed their cosmologies under the Parmenidean constraint that the basic constituents of reality must be ungenerated, indestructible, and unchanging. The atomists' atoms have Parmenidean attributes (eternal, indivisible, unchanging) but exist in infinite plurality and motion in the void; the framework attempts to preserve the Parmenidean rigor while recovering the plurality and change ordinary experience requires.

Plato's engagement is the most substantial single response. The dialogue Parmenides takes the older philosopher as the senior figure who teaches the young Socrates the rigorous discipline of logical inquiry; the central problem of the dialogue — the relation between the One and the Many — is the Platonic engagement with the Parmenidean denial of plurality. The dialogue Sophist explicitly addresses the Parmenidean prohibition on speaking of what is not and develops the framework within which negative predication can be allowed (the not of otherness rather than the not of non-being).

Aristotle's account of substance and change in the Physics and Metaphysics is similarly developed against the Parmenidean background. Aristotle distinguishes the substrate of change (which persists through the change) from the privation (what is not yet but comes to be) and the form (what comes to be); the framework allows for genuine change without violating the Parmenidean prohibition on what-is becoming what-is-not.

Reception

The ancient reception of Parmenides was substantial. The Eleatic tradition through Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos developed his framework; the Sophists and the Atomists engaged it; the entire Platonic and Aristotelian framework can be read as sustained engagement with the Parmenidean problem. The later ancient commentary tradition (Simplicius especially, whose sixth-century commentary on Aristotle's Physics preserves most of the surviving Parmenidean fragments) made the poem available to subsequent generations.

The modern recovery began with Hermann Diels's Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903; revised by Walther Kranz in subsequent editions through 1952), which gave the canonical numbering of Pre-Socratic fragments still used in contemporary scholarship. The substantial twentieth-century engagement through Heidegger (whose Introduction to Metaphysics, 1953, and What Is Called Thinking?, 1954, gave a substantial existentialist-ontological reading), G. E. L. Owen, Alexander Mourelatos (The Route of Parmenides, 1970), and Patricia Curd has produced one of the most active areas of contemporary ancient philosophy.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes John Palmer's Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy (2009), the work of Néstor-Luis Cordero (By Being, It Is, 2004), Patricia Curd's continuing work, and the Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (Long, ed., 1999). The new Loeb Classical Library edition of the early Greek philosophers (edited by André Laks and Glenn Most, 2016) provides the dominant contemporary scholarly text and translation. Active debates concern the precise interpretation of the unthinkability premise, the relation between the Way of Truth and the Way of Opinion, and the contemporary applicability of the Parmenidean framework in metaphysics and the philosophy of time.

Further reading

• Plato — the major successor whose dialogue Parmenides engages him directly
• Aristotle — the successor whose account of substance and change responds to the Parmenidean denial
• Heraclitus — the Pre-Socratic contemporary whose doctrine of universal flux contrasts with Parmenides's denial of change
• Form — the Platonic doctrine partly developed in response to the Parmenidean framework

The Pre-Socratic philosopher of Elea whose poem On Nature is the founding statement of Western metaphysics.