Parmenides
c. 515 – after 450 BCE · Elea, southern Italy
The thinker who argued, from pure logic, that change and plurality are impossible, and so set the problem that Western metaphysics spent centuries answering.
Key ideas
Parmenides argued that what is not cannot be thought or spoken of. From this he drew a startling conclusion: coming into being, passing away and change are all impossible, since each would require something to come from, or turn into, what is not. Reality is one, unchanging and complete. The world of change our senses show us is the 'way of opinion', not the way of truth.
Almost nobody accepted the conclusion, but almost everybody after him had to answer the argument. Plato's theory of forms and Aristotle's distinction between actuality and potentiality can both be read as replies. His student Zeno of Elea defended him by showing that the ordinary belief in motion leads to paradoxes of its own.
Life, briefly
Parmenides came from Elea, a Greek colony on the coast of southern Italy, and is said to have written its laws. Plato describes him visiting Athens in old age with Zeno and meeting a young Socrates, though that meeting may be literary invention.
Major works
- A philosophical poem, usually called On Nature, of which about 160 lines survive
Appears in
Further reading
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Parmenides
- WikipediaParmenides