The story
Around 475 BCE, Parmenides of Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy, composed a philosophical poem in epic verse. About 160 lines survive, quoted by later writers. A young man is carried in a chariot to a goddess, who shows him two ways of inquiry. On the way of truth, what is, is, and what is not, is not. What is not cannot be thought or spoken of, so nothing can come from nothing and nothing can perish. Whatever exists must be uncreated, whole, one and unchanging. The way of opinion describes the ordinary world of many things in motion, and the goddess warns that it is a deception built on the habits of mortals.
Parmenides pushed the Ionian search for one underlying reality to a hard logical conclusion, and he did so against Heraclitus, who made change the heart of the world. His method matters as much as his result: he argues from premises to conclusions and accepts a conclusion even when the senses contradict it, which makes him a founder of metaphysics and of logical argument in philosophy. His pupil Zeno defended him with paradoxes. The atomists Leucippus and Democritus replied that a void, a kind of what is not, must exist so that atoms can move.
Why it mattered
- Zeno's paradoxes grew directly out of the defense of Parmenides' position and set problems for mathematics that lasted twenty-two centuries.
- Atomism arose as a reply: Democritus accepted that being cannot change but gave it many unchanging atoms moving in a void.
- Plato's theory of Forms, unchanging objects of true knowledge, keeps the Parmenidean idea that real being does not change.
- The principle that reason may overrule sense experience became a standard move in later rationalist philosophy.
Sources
- Parmenides Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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