Parmenides Of Elea

Parmenides of Elea, often consider the Grandfather or Father of Western Philosophy, lived and wrote during the early to middle part of the fifth century BCE. His didactic poem On Nature survives only in fragments, while the "Proem," the introductory verses to On Nature, have been fully preserved.

The story begins with Parmenides traveling to the home, or underworld, in which the goddesses Day and Night reside. Two parts make up the work, the first being "The Way of Truth" and the second "The Way of Appearance." Parmenides writes in an apocalyptic style which begs a number of hermeneutical questions; however, Parmenides seeks to critique the metaphysical theories proposed before him.

Truth, to Parmenides, was necessarily eternal and immutable. He lays out a thought experiment. First, two methods of inquiry exist, to seek that which is and that which is not. Something either is or is not. To him, the latter is impossible because to speak of something that is not is unintelligible. Something cannot be known if it does not exist. Therefore, inquiry seeks that which is.

Thinkers prior to his era proposed metaphysical first principles that fundamentally required change or motion, a necessity Parmenides found absurd. For change and motion exist, something must transition from an is not to an is, and that which is notis an impossibility. Therefore, his first principle(s) started with the purest form of that which is: eternity and immutability.

Parmenides' conclusions leave us with quite a few reservations. From his perspective, our empirical view of the world must change and/or re-explain notions such as change, generation, motion, and asymmetry. On the other hand, this narrative may caution us against the fallible reasons of man, as explained in a lengthy cosmology put forth by the goddess.

Parmenides certainly questioned the thinkers of his day, but thinkers today are still up in the air about his work. The most common interpretation of Parmenides reads him as a material monist, where the prime substance of the world is simply eternity and immutability. This is, however, very short-sighted. A better interpretation may suggest that Parmenides wishes to juxtapose two ways of thinking: Truth versus appearance, theory versus practice, reason versus experience, so on and so forth. This interpretation allows for Parmenides critique of earlier philosophers and suggests that metaphysics must not only consider change and motion as fundamental principles but also eternity and immutability.

An additional interpretation explains that Parmenides is developing a "meta" physics, an eternal and immutable substance/world, from which the changing and moving physical world, known as physics, comes. Likewise, scholars have built on this interpretation with modal and perspectival adjustments, in which "appearances" are different modes or perspectives of some monistic substance.

In any event, Parmenides opens up new questions to the dialogue of philosophy that proceeded him. Plato, in particular, based hisParmenides on his work, about which he probably learned a great deal from Socrates, who Parmenides supposedly met in Socrates' younger days on a trip to Athens. Likewise, Plato's Republic certainly shares many themes with Parmenides' work, most obviously through Plato's "Allegory of the Cave."

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