Parmenides

"The Greek tradition was a complete contrast to that of the Far East. ...the Greeks placed logic at the pinnacle of human thinking. Their sceptical attitude towards the wielding of non-being as some sort of something that could be subject to logical development was exemplified by Parmenides influential arguments against the concept of empty space. ...He maintained that you can only speak about what is: what is not cannot be thought of, and what cannot be thought of cannot be. ...more unexpected was the further conclusion that time, motion nor change could exist either."

"The crisis at the heart of Parmenides argument, "is or is not," rules out any candidate for an ultimate entity in an explanation of what there is that is subject to coming-to-be, passing-away, or alteration of any sort. Such an entity must be a whole, complete, unchanging unity: it must be a thing that is of a single kind … But it does not follow from this that there can be only one such entity. Parmenides arguments allow for a plurality of fundamental, predicationally unified entities that can be used to explain the world reported by the senses."

"What is clear is that Parmenides is making a conscious attempt at some kind of a new start. Like Descartes, he is trying to find an unassailable starting-point on which something further can be built. This search is understandable, given the intellectual situation of the time. The principles of the Milesians had yielded no one clearly true system, but a number of rival ones — in itself a scandal. Heraclitus had made the whole of cosmology suspect by revealing deep-seated contradictions at its heart. In the background, the Pythagoreans were directly or indirectly stimulating new lines of thought and using them, perhaps, for their own mysterious purposes."

"Of the philosophers, Thales is vaguely reported to have taught that souls are immortal. But neither he nor his immediate successors... believed in the immortality of particular souls... This doctrine belongs to the Orphic tradition. In Heracleitus and Parmenides we find the two doctrines of immortality... implicit in mysticism, separated... for the first time. Heracleitus is the champion of the Dionysiac... life and death... in an unending cycle; Parmenides, under Orphic influence, teaches... Soul has fallen from... light and reality to the dark and unreal... bodily existence. This, however, is... only the way of opinion... [Parmenides] feels.... that... substantiality... is not so easily got rid of. But he will not give up... eternal substance. The most interesting fragment of Parmenides... seems to enunciate, for the first time in Greek thought, the mystical doctrine of eternity as a timeless Now, as opposed to the popular... unending succession. There remains then only to give an account of one way—that real Being exists. Many signs... showing... it is unborn, indestructible, entire, unique, unshakable, and unending. It never was, and it never will be, since it is all together present in the Now, one and indivisible. Empedocles... repudiates... Parmenides, probably on the ground that he reduces the world of time and change to nullity... thus leaves no pathway from appearance to reality. His doctrine of the soul’s exile and wanderings is... Orphic doctrine, which Pindar also gives... in the second Olympian Ode. The Soul sins by separating itself from God... from love and a choice of strife ’ in the place of harmony. The immortal Soul is... love and strife blended; the body... only an alien garment... perishes at death. ...Empedocles describes the Soul as a ratio, or harmony ...the complex of...strife... bound... by the principle of unity...love...Parmenides ...may be ...rejects the Pytdhagorean doctrines ...finds truth in static materialism."

"What-is was not generated from what-is-not, because what-is-not cannot give rise to anything in addition to itself. This is the first enunciation of the principle "out of nothing, nothing comes to be,"? which was implicit in earlier Greek thought even as far back as Hesiod and which afterwards, because of Parmenides, became a touchstone for subsequent Greek cosmogonies. These arguments show that coming to be from what-is-not is impossible, which is... relevant in the first stage of a cosmogony. The arguments say nothing of more familiar cases of coming to be, which can be described in terms of changes among already existing things."

"As Parmenides categorically threw out all observation with the senses, so this student of philosophy is inclined to throw out Parmenides as a complete waste of time! His static theories denying motion and change were in direct antithesis to the Kinetic metaphysics of Heracleitus, and his depressing monism was later refuted by the atomists Democritus and Leucippus. In a nutshell; in a word; Parmenides is Pah! — and definitely not a philosopher to take to bed with you on a long winter evening! … Personally speaking the whole thing makes me shudder — although I do acknowledge that paradoxes and riddles are very popular with the average thirteen-year-old school boy. Zeno however, impressed his dialectical ability on Socrates, who then began turning it loose on the average citizen in the Agora (market-place) and in consequence made himself most unpopular. I only think that it is a pity that when they asked Socrates to drink the hemlock in 399 B.C., they didn t include Zeno and Parmenides in the invitation."

"Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. Its here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, "The Good and the True are not necessarily the same," and goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition."

"The path of speech (mythos odoio) (by Parmenides) contains within itself the path of day and that of night. It is no coincidence that Parmenides poem comprises two parts. What exactly the second part contains and why it is so is an ancient philological and exegetical problem that we will not address here and which Plato already denounced in its ambiguity. In fact, it is not possible to separate being and speech without identifying them, and it is not possible to identify them without, ipso facto, separating them. The “simulation” (the simul) is immediate and structural. Human beings are simulators precisely because they are beings of truth. They cannot tell the truth without lying and vice versa. In this sense, they are beings of mediation, beings that stand in the middle, as you happily recall, that is, beings that ‘work’ to translate immediate experience into knowledge, or into a transferential process. God and nature do not work, but human beings do, first and foremost in naming the fruit of sexuality; it then places humans in the relational milieu of parents and children, brothers and sisters, offered, either really or symbolically, in sacrifice to God, that is, to the community of speakers. [...] The 20th century cannot exist without Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis cannot exist without philosophy, at least in my opinion."

"The philosophy of Parmenides is a strange blend of mysticism and logic. It is mysticism, for its goal is not the gradual and cumulative correction of empirical knowledge, but deliverance from it through the instantaneous and absolute grasp of "immovable" truth. This is not the way of techne, but the way of revelation: it lies "beyond the path of men" (B. 1.27). Yet this revelation is itself addressed to mans reason and must be judged by reason. Its core is pure logic: a rigorous venture in deductive thinking, the first of its kind in European thought. This kind of thinking could be used against the world of the senses … This projection of the logic of Being upon the alien world of Becoming was Parmenides most important single contribution to the history of thought, though it is seldom recognized as such. Without it, his doctrine of Being could have remained a speculative curiosity. With it, he laid the foundations for the greatest achievement of the scientific imagination of Greece, the atomic hypothesis."

"What... was the step that placed the Ionian cosmologists... above the [] level of the Maoris? ...[T]he real advance made by the scientific men of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was, when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now. The great principle which underlies all their thinking, though it is first put into words by Parmenides, is that Nothing comes into being out of nothing, and nothing passes away into nothing. They saw, however, that particular things were always coming into being and passing away again, and from this it followed that their existence was no true or stable one. The only things that were real and eternal were the original matter which passed through all these changes and the motion which gave rise to them, to which was... added that law of proportion or compensation..."

"Parmenides does not say a word about "Being" anywhere. The assertion that it is...amounts to ...the universe is a plenum; and ...there is no ...empty space ...From this it follows that there can be no such thing as motion. Instead of endowing the One with an impulse to change, as Herakleitos... Parmenides dismissed change as an illusion. He showed... if you take the One seriously you are bound to deny everything else. All previous solutions... had missed the point."

"Greek philosophy returned for some time to the concept of the One in the teachings of Parmenides... His most important contribution... was, perhaps, that he introduced a purely logical argument into metaphysics. "One cannot know what is not—that is impossible—nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be." Therefore, only the One is, and there is no becoming or passing away. Parmenides denied the existence of empty space for logical reasons. Since all change requires empty space... he dismissed change as an illusion."