Philosophy
c. 515 to 450 BC, Elea
Being is one and unchanging: the way of truth, against the senses.
Start learning Parmenides →Parmenides’ revolutionary claim that ‘what is, is’ - that Being simply is , eternal and unchanging - and that reason, not the deceptive senses, is the only path to truth, launching metaphysics and the rigorous use of pu…
Parmenides’ doctrine of the two ways of inquiry - the Way of Truth (‘It is’) and the forbidden Way of Not-Being (‘It is not’) - and his momentous denial of the void, the empty space that the Atomists would later resurre…
Parmenides’ rigorous deduction of the properties Being must have - ungenerated, imperishable, whole, one, continuous, unmoved, and complete ‘like a well-rounded sphere’ - the first systematic attempt to derive the natur…
Parmenides’ profound claim that ‘it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be’ - identifying the limits of thought with the limits of reality - and the great confrontation with Plato, who honoured ‘father Pa…
Parmenides’ ‘Way of Opinion’ - his account of the deceptive world of the senses - and the brilliant defence mounted by his pupil Zeno of Elea, whose paradoxes of motion and plurality turned the tables on common sense, s…
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