THE PARMENIDES December 2009

In this project i found many good informations about Parmenides work.

Parmenides work

Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. Parmenides was also a priest of Apollo and iatromantis. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem which has survived only in fragmentary form. Parmenides was born in the Greek colony of Elea, which, according to Herodotus, had been founded shortly before 535 BCE. He was descended from a wealthy and illustrious family. His dates are uncertain; according to Diogenes Laërtius, he flourished just before 500 BCE, which would put his year of birth near 540 BCE, but Plato has him visiting Athens at the age of 65, when Socrates was a young man, c. 450 BCE, which, if true, suggests a year of birth of 515 BCE. He was said to have been a pupil of Xenophanes, and regardless of whether they actually knew each other, Xenophanes' philosophy is the most obvious influence on Parmenides. Diogenes Laërtius also describes Parmenides as a disciple of "Ameinias, son of Diochaites, the Pythagorean"; but there are no obvious Pythagorean elements in his thought. The first hero cult of a philosopher we know of was Parmenides' dedication of a heroon to his teacher Ameinias in Velia, south of Naples. Parmenides was the founder of the School of Elea, which also included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos. Of his life in Elea, it was said that he had written the laws of the city. His most important pupil was Zeno, who according to Plato, was twenty-five years his junior, and was his eromenos. Parmenides had a large influence on Plato, who not only named a dialogue, Parmenides, after him, but always spoke of him with veneration. (Wikipedia)
In this poem, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In The Way of Truth, he explains how reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, and unchanging. In The Way of Opinion, he explains the world of appearances, which is false and deceitful. These thoughts strongly influenced Plato, and through him, the whole of western philosophy. Parmenides' poem began with a proem describing a journey he figuratively once made to the abode of a goddess. He described how he was conveyed on “the far-fabled path of the divinity” in a chariot by a team of mares and how the maiden daughters of Helios, the sun-god, led the way. These maidens take Parmenides to whence they themselves have come, to “the halls of Night”, before which stand “the gates of the paths of night and day”. The maidens gently persuade Justice, guardian of these gates, to open them so that Parmenides himself may pass through to the abode within. Parmenides thus describes how the goddess who dwells there welcomed him upon his arrival. Parmenides' proem is no epistemological allegory of enlightenment but a topographically specific description of a mystical journey to the halls of Night. In Hesiod, the “horrible dwelling of dark Night” is where the goddesses Night and Day alternately reside as the other traverses the sky above the Earth. Both Parmenides' and Hesiod's conception of this place have their precedent in the Babylonian mythology of the sun god's abode. This abode also traditionally served as a place of judgment, and this fact tends to confirm that when Parmenides' goddess tells him that no ill fate has sent him ahead to this place, she is indicating that he has miraculously reached the place to which travel the souls of the dead. (Stanford College)
After the exposition of the origin, the necessary part of reality that is understood through reason or logos, in the next section, the Way of Appearance/Opinion/Seeming, Parmenides proceeds to explain the structure of the becoming cosmos that comes from this origin. The traditional interpretation of Parmenides' work is that he argued that the every-day perception of reality of the physical world’s mistaken, and that the reality of the world is 'One Being' unchanging, ingenerated, indestructible whole. Under the Way of Opinion, Parmenides set out a contrasting but more conventional view of the world, thereby becoming an early exponent of the duality of appearance and reality. For him and his pupils, the phenomena of movement and change are simply appearances of a static, eternal reality. It is with respect to this religious/mystical context that recent generations of scholars such as Alexander P. Mourelatos, Charles H. Kahn, and the controversial Peter Kingsley have begun to call parts of the traditional, rational logical/philosophical interpretation of Parmenides into question. It has been claimed that previous scholars placed too little emphasis on the apocalyptic context in which Parmenides frames his revelation. As a result, traditional interpretations have put Parmenidean philosophy into a more modern, metaphysical context to which it is not necessarily well suited, which has led to misunderstanding of the true meaning and intention of Parmenides' message. The obscurity and fragmentary state of the text, however, renders almost every claim that can be made about Parmenides extremely contentious, and the traditional interpretation has by no means been abandoned. (Wikipedia)
The strict monist interpretation is influentially represented in the first two volumes of W. K. C. Guthrie's A History of Greek Philosophy, where it is accorded a critical role in the development of early Greek natural philosophy from the purported material monism of the early Milesians to the pluralist physical theories of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the early atomists, Leucippus and Democritus. On Guthrie's strict monist reading, Parmenides' deduction of the nature of reality led him to conclude “that reality, and must be, a unity in the strictest sense and that any change in it impossible” and therefore that “the world as perceived by the senses is unreal”. Parmenides made the ontological argument against nothingness, essentially denying the possible existence of a void. According to Aristotle, this led Leucippus to propose the atomic theory, which supposes that everything in the universe is either atoms or voids, specifically to contradict Parmenides' argument. Aristotle himself, proclaimed, in opposition to Leucippus, the dictum horror vacui or "nature abhors a vacuum". Aristotle reasoned that in a complete vacuum, motion would encounter no resistance, and thus infinite speed would be possible, something which Aristotle would not accept. (Stanford College)

Works Cited

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides
• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/