ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 4: PARMENIDIES
Parmenidies & Heraclitus seen as opposites, now as alike
- Eleasticism (Elea) school/movement: Zeno, Parmenidies, Melissus
PARMENIDIES:
[With other Pre-Socratics we mostly know them through Aristotle, for Parmenidies it’s via Plato]
- born around 544BCE, when Elea was founded by Ionians
- tainted by Plato’s Parmenidies/Sophist (founder of ontology/being?)
- modern account: more of a cosmologist than ontologist
- interested in the beings of nature and cosmos
On Nature:
- in hexamemter (Homeric, Hesiodic meter)
- novel content, old delivery
- knowledge presented as divine revelation (like invocations of the Muses)
- Truth is a divine revelation
- like Heraclitus - language sufficiently explains Truth
- not common language (like in Plato, Heraclitus), but reason/logos can reach it
Fragmens 2 & 3:
- 2 ways of knowledge: via negation and via necessity
- there is a perfect match between what can be thought, and what is
- so reality and language are mirrors
- this is also a unity of subject and object (later destroyed by the Sophists)
Fragment 6:
- impossible for nothing to be
- what can be spoken of can be
- common people mix in the two ways (not-being and being)
Fragment 8:
- what is (Being): uncreated, imperishable, entire, immovable, endless, ever-present
What is the object of the way of truth?:
- perhaps the totality of all beings that compose a continuous entity
- not aware of ontology, just a cosmological explanation of being
- all other pre-socratics looked for the common element in all things (water, air, Aperion, Logos)
- Parmenedies said that common element was EXISTENCE ITSELF
- so Being is what is common to all beings (same question, different answer)
- he is thinking of everything, since only everything composes this complete Being
What is: extensional, refering to everything that exists
- Plato and Aristotle make it intentional, introducing the question of what it means to be
Parmenidies and Heraclitus:
- there is both change and stability, something stands behind all change
- for Parmenidies change within the realm of Being is possible, but something cannot pass from Being to non-Being
Not-Being:
- simply those things that do not exist
New Method:
- reductio ad absurdum
- no longer via observation, but comprehending the logical principles of a thing
- perception deceives us, Being (What Is) has an internal logic accessible via reason
ZENO:
- dialectical, logical method using Parmenidies
- no plurality, no motion, no space, no time
- Achillies and the tortoise
- if something has parts they must also have parts ad infinity, or something has no parts
- reality is one and unchanging
- Zeno denies change itself (unlike Parmenidies), disinterested in observation, only in reason
MELISSUS:
- more cosmological, gives proper proofs of Parmenidies’ claims
- Being must be one (if its two - A and B - then they both admit to Being in comparison with non-Being, so it goes back to being one)
- more observation, reality based
- Melissus was the one who invented the One