{"id":6764,"date":"2015-12-20T14:50:45","date_gmt":"2015-12-20T14:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/?p=6764"},"modified":"2020-06-20T22:38:49","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T22:38:49","slug":"primer-on-parmenides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/2015\/12\/primer-on-parmenides\/","title":{"rendered":"Primer on Parmenides"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shawn Daniels is a Ph.D. of classical studies and contributing guest writer for CelebrityTypes. As always with guest writers on the site, Daniels\u2019 piece represents his\u00a0own insights and assessments and not necessarily those of the site.<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Shawn Daniels, Ph.D.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Parmenides was born in the colony of Elea, a coastal town in the southwest of Italy. A part of Magna Graecia <\/em>(the string of Greek-speaking colonies scattered\u00a0throughout the south of Italy prior to Rome\u2019s ascendance), Elea was destined to spawn its own school of Pre-Socratic philosophy: The Eleatics, of whom Parmenides was the first and founding member.<\/p>\n

Little is known for certain about his life, but it seems that he was born around 515 BCE to a wealthy or upper middle class family. Some sources state that he was an excellent citizen: Legislator, medical man, and an acolyte in the rituals honoring Apollo. Plato, too, spoke highly of Parmenides, calling him \u201cvenerable and awesome\u201d in\u00a0Theaetetus<\/em> 183e.<\/p>\n

Unlike Pythagoras<\/a>, Parmenides is not primarily known for his interpersonal, social, or moral\u00a0accomplishments. As the founder and head of the Eleatics, his greatest contribution to ancient thought lay not in ethics or in the organization of a spiritual brotherhood. But on the other hand, nor was he a standard scientist\u00a0like\u00a0the Milesians; he was not primarily interested in nature, or\u00a0in forming descriptive hypotheses about its workings, as they had been: Instead, he felt that reason and logic alone should be the best measures of truth.<\/p>\n

The principle that guided Parmenides, as well as his successors in the Eleatic school (including Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos) was to let reason and logic operate in a vacuum, without cross-referencing\u00a0their dictates\u00a0with observations from the outside world. The result was a remarkable series of postulates, which even the non-Eleatics across the ancient world felt\u00a0forced to grapple with and address. Even to this day, few hypotheses in philosophy or science are anything like those of Parmenides;\u00a0a testament to\u00a0the uniqueness and exclusivity of his approach.<\/p>\n

Parmenides\u2019 major work is called On Nature <\/em>(text<\/a>). In contrast to the prose tradition of Ionian philosophers, Parmenides composed his philosophy in hexameters, the traditional verse of the epic poems, as utilized by Homer and Hesiod. The work\u00a0consists of three parts: The Proem<\/em>, which introduces the treatise; The Way of Truth<\/em>, which discusses what is real according to reason and logic; and The Way of Opinion<\/em>, which discusses that which men think<\/em> is true, but which is really false or illusory according to reason. Of these three parts, only The Proem<\/em> seems to have survived in its entirety, with the German classicist H.A. Diels estimating that we have about 90% of The Way of Truth <\/em>and only 10% of The Way of Opinion <\/em>preserved intact.\u00a0Nevertheless, from the outline presented in The Proem<\/em>, as well as from the remaining fragments and commentaries on (and responses to) Parmenides that we have from other thinkers of the ancient world, we can make some certain assessments about the contents of his philosophy.<\/p>\n

As far as we can tell, his main ideas were as follows:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Everything that exists has Being; if it did not possess\u00a0Being, it would not be.<\/li>\n
  2. There is no non-Being in the universe; if non-Being possessed Being, it would not be non-Being. If non-Being is without\u00a0being, it cannot be.<\/li>\n
  3. There is no counterpart to Being, nor are there different kinds of Being; Being is all the same\u00a0and\u00a0continuous, everywhere. Hence there\u00a0can be no distinction between ‘here’ or ‘there’; ‘this’ or ‘that.’<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These points may take a little getting used to, but from the standpoint of ordinary thought, Parmenides is grasping at something akin to what Kant was referring to when he said that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” However, while Kant was utilizing this dictum to advocate his own philosophy of\u00a0Transcendental Idealism, Parmenides was (adversely\u00a0speaking) quite content to play around with “thoughts without content” – thoughts that by Kantian, and even by common sense standards, are\u00a0empty. To put things differently, empirical scientists like the\u00a0Milesians, or even modern scientists, would be partial to mixing Being with\u00a0various other predicates, such as “fire,” “iron,” or “atmospheric air.” Thus their cosmology is essentially twofold, but Parmenides tells us squarely\u00a0that such people “have\u00a0made up their minds to name two forms, of which it is not right to name one” (8.53-54).<\/p>\n

    What Parmenides means by this is that the different predicates are not really independent of one another, nor are they opposites. In fact, they are not really constituents of reality, but expressions of the one continuous Being that men merely\u00a0seem<\/em>\u00a0to experience as different, because they know no better than to trust their senses. Since the possibility of an ‘other,’ standing opposite to being or modifying it with predicates is ruled out a priori<\/em>, we cannot appeal to the\u00a0seeming difference between the different constituents of Being (e.g. fire, iron, ice, air, and so on) if we are to engage with Parmenides on his own terms. However, \u00a0another objection to the thought of Parmenides might be to point to change and time and to call attention to how something that is supposedly completely continuous and homogeneous does very much seem\u00a0to change over time and thus to be marked by coming-into-being and passing-away. But Parmenides will\u00a0not allow immediate observation to sway the first principles contained in his logic. To him, time is just another continuity of Being, no more substantial or independent than the supposed predicates; both are only\u00a0relative and seeming, whereas the existence of Being is\u00a0absolute. Thus, Parmenides’ cosmology\u00a0has more than a few affinities with the 20th century debate between Einstein and Popper, where Einstein held that change was\u00a0a human illusion (or very nearly so), while Popper tried to argue that if biological\u00a0organisms\u00a0experience change, then that change must be real in some respect.<\/p>\n

    From the quotations and commentaries on his work\u00a0that remain, the\u00a0general picture that can be drawn of Parmenides\u00a0seems to be that of an unusually analytical\u00a0thinker who challenged all who dared depend on the senses and common sense to make clear what, exactly, the justification for doing so might be. A\u00a0unique point of reference\u00a0for logicians and philosophers, and even for such\u00a0physicists as Einstein, Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli, Parmenides\u2019 position in the history of thought\u00a0is that of a true Greek original whose\u00a0challenges to ordinary thought have never been resolved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Shawn Daniels is a Ph.D. of classical studies and contributing guest writer for CelebrityTypes. As always with guest writers on the site, Daniels\u2019 piece represents his\u00a0own insights and assessments and not necessarily those of the site.\u00a0 By Shawn Daniels, Ph.D. Parmenides was born in the colony of Elea, a coastal town in the southwest of[\u2026] Continue Reading<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6764"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6798,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764\/revisions\/6798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}