User:Carchasm/sandbox/Parmenides
5th century BC Greek philosopher / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Parmenides of Elea (/pɑːrˈmɛnɪdiːz ... ˈɛliə/; Greek: Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης; fl. late sixth or early fifth century BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia.
Parmenides of Elea | |
---|---|
Born | c. late 6th century BC |
Died | c. 5th century BC |
Era | Pre-Socratic philosophy |
Region | Ancient Greek philosophy |
School | Eleatic school |
Main interests | Epistemology, Ontology, Cosmology |
Notable ideas | Monism, Truth vs Opinion |
Parmenides was born in the Greek colony of Elea, from a wealthy and illustrious family.[lower-alpha 1] His dates are uncertain; according to doxographer Diogenes Laërtius, he flourished just before 500 BC,[lower-alpha 2] which would put his year of birth near 540 BC, but in the dialogue Parmenides Plato has him visiting Athens at the age of 65, when Socrates was a young man, c. 450 BC,[lower-alpha 3] which, if true, suggests a year of birth of c. 515 BC.[1]
Parmenides wrote only one work: a philosophical poem in dactylic hexameter verse, of which only fragments preserved in quotations from other authors have survived. The poem's original title is unknown but it is often referred to by later commentators as On Nature. Although the poem only survives in fragments, the integrity of the poem is remarkably higher than what has come down to us from the works of almost all the rest Presocratic philosophers, and therefore classicists can reconstruct the philosophical doctrines with greater precision. From what we can deduce from the surviving testimonies, Parmenides's poem presents an allegorical divine revelation on the nature of reality, divided into two parts:
- The way of "Alethia, usually translated as "truth," where he deals with "what-is"[lower-alpha 4] and present several arguments that demonstrate its attributes: it is impossible for it to have come into being, and therefore it is ungenerated and indestructible, it is the only thing that truly exists —thus denying the existence of nothing— it is homogeneous, immobile and perfected.
- The "way of "Doxa" translated as "the way of the opinions of mortals", where he describes the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful, and deals with issues such as the origin or the world, the makeup of the stars, various meteorological and geographical phenomena, and the origin of humanity and differentiation of the sexes, building a complete cosmological doctrine.
While the content of the way of opinion resembles the physical speculations of earlier thinkers such as the Ionians and the Pythagoreans, the way of truth contains a completely new theory of ontology that radically modifies the course of ancient philosophy: Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos are considered to have accepted its premises and continued its thought, and Zeno's paradoxes of motion were developed to defend Parmenides' views. Later physicists, such as Empedocles, Anaxagoras and the atomists, sought alternatives to overcome the crisis in which the knowledge of the sensible had been thrown. Even the sophistry of Gorgias shows an enormous influence of Parmenides in his argumentative form.
Parmenides has been considered the founder of metaphysics and a forerunner of the development of term logic and has, through his influence on Plato's Theory of Forms and Aristotle's metaphysics, influenced the whole history of Western philosophy.[2] In contemporary philosophy, Parmenides' work has remained relevant in debates about the philosophy of time.