Nevertheless, the internal evidence and testimonia provide good reasons to accept the traditional assignment of fragments to this section, as well as their general arrangement. Admittedly, the Greek is ambiguous about what exactly it is not right for mortals to do. It is common amongst scholars to read these passages as claiming it is either wrong for mortals to name both Light and Night, or that naming just one of these opposites is wrong and the other acceptable.
This reading tends to suggest that Parmenides is either denying the existence of the duality completely, or accepting that only one of them properly exists. The same holds if only Night is named. Thus, it would not seem appropriate to name only one of these forms.
This problem is only doubled if both forms are named. Thus, it would seem that mortals should not name either form, and thus both Light and Night are denied as proper objects of thought. This universal denigration is first introduced at C 8.
If this is truly a concluding passage, the apparently disparate content of Opinion is unified as a treatment of mortal errors in naming, which the section uncontroversially began with. The outer ones with night, along which spews forth a portion of flame. This is clearly the case with respect to C , as the governing goddess is explicitly said to direct male-female intercourse in C This is then followed by a more intuitive cosmogony, suffused with traditional mythopoetical elements Opinion —a world full of generation, perishing, motion, and so forth.
It is uncontroversial that Reality is positively endorsed, and it is equally clear that Opinion is negatively presented in relation to Aletheia.
However, there is significant uncertainty regarding the ultimate status of Opinion , with questions remaining such as whether it is supposed to have any value at all and, if so, what sort of value.
While most passages in the poem are consistent with a completely worthless Opinion , they do not necessitate that valuation; even the most obvious denigrations of Opinion itself or mortals and their views are not entirely clear regarding the exact type or extent of its failings. Even more troubling, there are two passages which might suggest some degree of positive value for Opinion —however, the lines are notoriously difficult to understand.
Thus, it is helpful to examine more closely the passages where the relationship between the sections is most directly treated. C 1: …And it is necessary for you to learn all things, 28b Both the still-heart of persuasive reality, And the opinions of mortals, in which there is no trustworthy persuasion. From the very beginning of her speech, the goddess presents the opinions of mortals that is, Opinion negatively in relation to Reality.
However, it does not necessarily follow from these lines that Opinion is entirely false or valueless. At most, all that seems entailed here is a comparative lack of epistemic certainty in relation to Reality. Accepting that it is the content of Opinion that is deceptive, one of the most difficult interpretative questions regarding Opinion remains. Mortal beliefs are also unequivocally derided in between these bookends to Reality , though in slightly different terms.
C 5 not only claims mortal views are in error, it identifies the source of their error—confusing being and non-being. Given the passages outlined so far in this section, there appears to be quite a substantial case for taking Opinion to be entirely false and lacking any value whatsoever. Nevertheless, this may not be the entire story. Furthermore, there is at least some textual evidence that might be understood to suggest Opinion should not be treated as negatively as the passages considered so far would suggest.
As noted in the summary of the Proem above, there are two particularly difficult lines C 1. At most, these lines could only soften the negative treatment of mortal views. Only one further extant passage remains which might offer some reason to think Opinion maintains some positive value, and this is the passage most commonly appealed to for this purpose.
Since mortals are incorrect in their accounts, the particular account offered in Opinion is representative of such accounts, and is presented didactically—as an example of the sorts of accounts that should not be accepted. If the youth can learn to recognize what is fundamentally mistaken in this representative account Opinion , any alternative or derivative account offered by mortals which includes the same fundamental errors can be recognized and resisted. Given all of this, it is undeniable that Opinion is lacking in comparison to Aletheia , and certainly treated negatively in comparison.
It should also be taken as well-founded that the Opinion is epistemically inferior. Whether Opinion is also inferior in terms of veracity seems most likely—though again, it is not certain whether this means Opinion is entirely lacking in value, and the extent of its deceptiveness all content, or its fundamental premises and assumptions is still an open question.
The purpose is to provide the reader with a head-start on how scholars have tended to think about these aspects of the poem, and some of the difficulties and objections these views have faced. The treatment is not meant to be at all exhaustive, nor advocate any particular view in favor of another. The only ancient response to the content of the Proem is from the Pyrrhonian Skeptic Sextus Empiricus 2 nd cn. In an attempt to demonstrate how Parmenides rejected opinions based upon sensory evidence in favor of infallible reason, Sextus set forth a detailed allegorical account in which most details described in the Proem are supposed to possess a particular metaphorical meaning relating to this epistemological preference.
In his attempt to make nearly every aspect of the story fit a particular metaphorical model, Sextus clearly overreaches all evidence and falls into obvious mistakes. The metaphorical associations are often strained at best, if not far beyond any reasonable speculation, particularly when one attempts to find metaphorical representations in every minor detail.
More theoretically problematic, determining some aspects to be allegorical while other details are not would seem to require some non-arbitrary methodology, which is not readily forthcoming. Recognition of this has led some to claim that while the Proem is certainly allegorical, we are so far distant from the cultural context as to have no hope of reliably accessing its metaphorical meanings for example, Curd Finally, the allegorical accounts available tend to offer little if any substantive guidance or interpretative weight for reading the poem overall.
With the decline of allegorical treatments, an interest in parsing the Proem in terms of possible shared historical, cultural, and mythical themes has ascended. Thus, it is overly speculative to hang very much on this purported influence with any confidence. The youth does not learn about any topics Orphism itself focuses on: moral truths, the nature of the soul itself, or what the afterlife was like.
A select few advocate that the reader is merely supposed to recognize that Parmenides is here indicating that his insights were the product of an actual spiritual experience he underwent. However, there is no real evidence for this, and some against. There are very close similarities between the imagery and thematic elements in the Proem and those found throughout the rest of the poem, especially Opinion.
Both the Proem and the theogonical cosmology in Opinion introduce an anonymous goddess. In fact, in contrast to Reality , both sections have extensive mythological content, which scholars have regularly overlooked. The obvious pervasive female presence in the Proem and the rest of the poem , particularly in relation to divinity, can also hardly be a coincidence, though its importance remains unclear.
Once considered at greater length, the parallels between the Proem and Opinion seem far too numerous and carefully contrived to be coincidental and unimportant. This suggests a stronger relationship between the Proem and Opinion than has commonly been recognized and the need for a much more holistic interpretative approach to the poem overall, in contrast to the more compartmentalized analyses that have been so pervasive.
Further scholarly consideration along these lines would likely prove quite fruitful. This approach provides a more universal appreciation of the A-D Paradox than taking on any selection of authors as foils, allowing the reader a broad appreciation for why various interpretative approaches to the poem have yet to yield a convincing resolution to this problem.
The most persistent approach to understanding the poem is to accept that for some reason—perhaps merely following where logic led him, no matter how counterintuitive the results—Parmenides has concluded that all of reality is really quite different than it appears to our senses. That mortals erroneously believe otherwise is a result of relying on their fallible senses instead of reason.
Thus, the account in Opinion lacks any intrinsic value and its inclusion in the poem must be explained in some practical way. It can be explained dialectically, as an exercise in explicating opposing views Owen It can also be explained didactically, as an example of the sort of views that are mistaken and should be rejected Taran This reading is certainly understandable.
The broad range of topics in Opinion seems to be intended as an exhaustive though mistaken account of the world, which the abstract and singular subject of Reality stands in corrective contrast to. While this view is pervasive and perhaps even defensible, many have found it hard to accept given its radical and absurd entailments.
Not only is the external world experienced by mortal senses denied reality, the very beings who are supposed to be misled by their senses are also denied existence, including Parmenides himself!
It is also difficult to reconcile the apparent length and detailed specificity characteristic of the account offered in Opinion as well as the Proem , if it is supposed to be entirely lacking in veracity. Providing such a detailed exposition of mortal views in a traditional cosmology just to dismiss it entirely, rather than continue to argue against mortal views by deductively demonstrating their principles to be incorrect, would be counterintuitive.
If the purpose is didactic, the latter approach would certainly be sufficient and far more succinct. The view that Parmenides went to such lengths to provide a dialectical opposition to his central thesis seems weak: a convenient ad hoc motivation which denies any substantial purpose for Opinion, implying a lack of unity to the overall poem. Though the strict monist view remains pervasive in introductory texts, contemporary scholars have tended to abandon it on account of these worrisome entailments.
Thus, alternative accounts tend to challenge one or both of these assumptions. Emphasizing the epistemic distinctions, it can be pointed out that the conclusions offered in Reality are reached through a priori, deductive reasoning—a methodology which can provide certainty of the conclusion, given the premises.
Parmenides attributes this failing to the fact that mortals rely entirely upon fallible, a posteriori sense experience. However, while mortal accounts may be fallible, as well as epistemically inferior to divine or deductive knowledge, such accounts may still be true. If it is just that Opinion is uncertain, and not completely false, then it can have intrinsic value. It is for these reasons that Parmenides provides his own, purportedly superior, cosmology.
Emphasizing the epistemological differences between these sections is not altogether wrong, as the explicit epistemic contrasts between these accounts in the poem are undeniable. However, holding the sole failing of Opinion to be its lack of epistemic certainty can hardly be the entire story. Furthermore, other aspects of the poem are not adequately addressed at all.
Attempts to resolve these issues have tended to rely upon positing an ontological hierarchy to complement the epistemic hierarchy. The account revealed by the divine methodology of logical deduction in Reality reveals what the world, or at least Being , must fundamentally be like. However, the world as it appears also exists in some ontologically inferior manner. Though any account of it cannot be truly correct, since mortals actually live in this lower ontological level, learning the best account of reality at that level remains important.
A number of objections can be raised to this interpretative approach. It is also quite difficult to offer a convincing explanation for what possible grounds Parmenides could have for ascribing superiority to his own account of the apparent world offered in Opinion , in comparison to any other mortal offering of his time.
While his cosmological claims may contain some novel truths moon gets its light from the sun, etc. Furthermore, the methodology does not appear to be superior in any way—Parmenides abandons his pioneering deduction in Reality , resorting to a traditional mythopoetic approach in Opinion. A promising suggestion by some recent commentators is that, rather than drawing ontological conclusions about the entirety of existence, Parmenides was instead focused on more abstract metaphysical considerations.
Nehamas and Curd have both developed more recent proposals along similar lines. A common upshot of Essentialist views is that, while it remains true that every fundamental entity that exists must be eternal, motionless, a unified whole, etc. Furthermore, this view can have welcome implications for the narrative of how Parmenides was received by his immediate successors that is, Anaxagoras , Empedocles , and the early Atomists.
Whatever the merits of this more limited and abstract thesis of Reality , such interpretations continue to face very similar, if not the same, problematic entailments and worries related to the value of the Opinion. First, there is substantial objection particular to such accounts. At the very least, one should expect some hint at how such an essentialist account of being could be consistent with mortal accounts.
However, there is not even a hint of such in Opinion. Furthermore, though the arguments in Reality are now consistent with a plurality of fundamental perfect beings, there seems to be no way such entirely motionless and changeless entities could be consistent with, or productive of, the contrary phenomena found in the world of mortal experience.
Thus, it remains difficult to see how Opinion could be true in any way, and the existence of mortals and Parmenides is still under threat, along with the implications that follow. The purpose of the poem is frustrated if mortals and Parmenides cannot exist.
If Opinion is still entirely worthless, then the objections concerning its length and specificity also remain. Only recently has its presence been taken seriously enough to warrant a full-fledged interpretative account that addresses the relationship between Reality and Opinion Palmer This approach is quite similar in some ways to the Essentialist approach.
The account in Reality is still intended to provide a thorough analysis of the essential properties of some kind of being.
However, the kind of being is more narrowly prescribed. Rather than an account of what any fundamental entity must be like, Parmenides is taken to explicate in Reality what any necessary being must necessarily be like, qua necessary being. Adopting this understanding provides new and compelling perspectives on a number of issues in Reality. Rather than importing the likely anachronistic parallels to modern philosophy of language, particularly Russellian concerns with negative existential statements, the difficulty can be taken to be the impossibility of conceiving of necessarily non-existent things for example, square-circles , which is a far more likely problem to have been recognized given the historical context.
It is also readily understood why knowledge along these lines is entirely trustworthy, as any necessary entity must have certain essential properties given the sort of thing it is and its mode of existence.
Though the modal view seems compelling in many ways with respect to Reality , the same might be said of other views considered above. Since Reality explicates the nature of necessary being, and this is a very different sort of thing from the contingent beings described in Opinion , the tension between these accounts has already been largely eliminated.
While Palmer has offered a very insightful and important contribution to Parmenidean studies, it is not beyond reproach or objection. Palmer takes the error of mortals to be thinking that contingent beings are all there is in the world, by relying solely upon their senses.
It is not that the objects in Opinion do not exist, it is that they do not share the same unwavering epistemic account as necessary being does, as the contingent objects and phenomena found in Opinion are in a certain way, and then they are not—as they change, move, come to be, perish, and so forth.
Nevertheless, the contingent world does exist, so there is value in knowing what one can about it. In this way, Palmer has succeeded in developing an interpretation that requires only an epistemic hierarchy between Reality and Opinion , without the additional ontological hierarchy of Two-World views and the anachronistic worries that accompany them.
While the modal view does allow the existence of contingent beings and thus an account of them would be valuable in-itself, it does not necessarily follow that this is what Parmenides was attempting in Opinion.
Such a positive treatment still seems to be in tension with the overarching negative treatment of Opinion throughout the poem. First, Palmer faces the challenges noted above of explaining why Parmenides would be entitled to think his own mythopoetic account in Opinion would be superior to any other mortal account. However, this would require that Parmenides really think there could be no further discoveries that would then surpass his own knowledge.
The answer is, of course, that they cannot. Since mortals have only ever relied upon their sense perceptions rather than deductive logic, they have never conceived of the essential nature of any necessary entity. Thus, their failure is to have believed that all of reality consisted entirely of contingent beings. However, if mortals have never conceived of necessary being, then they certainly could not ever have been wrong about it, and incorrectly predicated motion, change, coming-to-be, perishing, and so forth of it.
Palmer even realizes this tension and attempts to explain it away as follows:. Apparently because mortals are represented by the goddess as searching, along their own way of inquiry, for trustworthy thought and understanding, but they mistakenly suppose that this can have as its object something that comes to be and perishes, is and is not what is , and so on.
Again, the goddess represents mortals fixing their attention on entities that fall short of the mode of being she has indicated is required of a proper object of thought. However, this is no solution. Yet, this is certainly not the same error as mortals thinking that which is explicated in Aletheia can be properly described in ways contrary to its nature that is, coming to be, perishing, and so forth , which is precisely the error the goddess insists they commit.
In fact, a more negative treatment of Opinion seems necessary in order to avoid this fatal flaw. This allows for mortals to have a familiar subject divine being which they have up until now misunderstood through the mythopoetic tradition, failing to recognize that such would have to be a necessary being, and as such could not be born, die, move, change, or even be anthropomorphic. In explicating the essential nature of the divine qua necessary being in Reality , Parmenides can be understood as continuing the Xenophanean agenda of criticizing traditional, mythopoetic views of the divine, though he uses metaphysical and deductive argumentation, rather than the ethical appeals of his predecessor.
Incorporating naturalistic elements or principles that are supposed to be divine, in contrast to anthropomorphic conceptions from the mythopoetical tradition, was otherwise pervasive amongst the Presocratics.
The Milesians tended to treat their fundamental and eternal arche as divine entities. Pythagoras, perhaps more of a religious mystic in the first place, certainly included his own views on divinity. If so, the question remains whether he sought to further refine or challenge such views—or perhaps both. This section broadly analyzes the evidence for ascribing particular intellectual influences and teachers to Parmenides.
Sections 3. These sections do not purport to present a comprehensive taxonomy of modern interpretations, nor do they make any attempt to reference all the representatives and variants of the principal types of interpretation here described. They are not meant to be a history of modern Parmenides interpretation, as worthy and fascinating a topic as that is.
Since some advocates of the interpretations outlined in sections 3. After doing so in section 3. A successful interpretation should attend to the fr.
To this end, it should avoid attributing to Parmenides views that are patently anachronistic or, worse, views that cannot be coherently asserted or maintained. On this view, Parmenides considers the world of our ordinary experience non-existent and our normal beliefs in the existence of change, plurality, and even, it seems, our own selves to be entirely deceptive. Although less common than it once was, this type of view still has its adherents and is probably familiar to many who have only a superficial acquaintance with Parmenides.
The strict monist interpretation is influentially represented in the first two volumes of W. Finding reason and sensation to yield wildly contradictory views of reality, Parmenides presumed reason must be preferred and sensory evidence thereby rejected as altogether deceptive. It is thus illegitimate to suppose that everything came into being out of one thing Guthrie , 86—7. In addition to thus criticizing the theoretical viability of the monistic material principles of the early Milesian cosmologists, Parmenides also is supposed to have criticized the Milesian union of the material and moving cause in their principles by arguing that motion and change are impossible and inadmissible conceptions Guthrie , 5—6, Parmenides directs us to judge reality by reason and not to trust the senses.
Reason, as deployed in the intricate, multi-staged deduction of fragment 8, reveals what attributes whatever is must possess: whatever is must be ungenerated and imperishable; one, continuous and indivisible; and motionless and altogether unchanging, such that past and future are meaningless for it. There is the same type of tension in the outmoded proposals that Parmenides was targeting certain supposedly Pythagorean doctrines a view developed in Raven and ensconced in Kirk and Raven Here the watershed event was the publication of G.
The arguments of fragment 8, on this view, are then understood as showing that what can be thought and talked about is, surprisingly, without variation in time and space, that is, absolutely one and unchanging. While abandoning the idea that Parmenidean monism was a specific reaction to the theories of any of his predecessors, these two works continue to depict his impact on later Presocratic systems as decisive.
On their Owenian line, the story becomes that the arguments of Parmenides and his Eleatic successors were meant to be generally destructive of all previous cosmological theorizing, in so far as they purported to show that the existence of change, time, and plurality cannot be naively presumed. Brown , Untersteiner While this proposal has had fewer adherents among other interpreters favoring the Russell-Owen line, it has been taken up by certain advocates of the next type of interpretation.
One influential alternative to interpretations of Parmenides as a strict monist, certainly among scholars working in America, has been that developed by Alexander Mourelatos in his monograph, The Route of Parmenides.
As such, it is not an account of what there is namely, one thing, the only one that exists but, rather, of whatever is in the manner required to be an ontologically fundamental entity—a thing that is F , for some F , in an essential way. Thus Nehamas has more recently written:. To be a genuine entity, a thing must be a predicational unity, with a single account of what it is; but it need not be the case that there exists only one such thing.
Rather, the thing itself must be a unified whole. If it is, say, F , it must be all, only, and completely F. Mourelatos, Nehamas, and Curd all take Parmenides to be concerned with specifying in an abstract way what it is to be the nature or essence of a thing, rather than simply with specifying what there in fact is, as he is presumed to be doing on both the logical-dialectical and the more traditional strict monist readings.
Advocates of the meta-principle reading here face a dilemma. The cosmological principles light and night do not in fact conform to those strictures.
Not only is this an unstable interpretive position, it imputes confusion to Parmenides rather than acknowledge its own difficulties. Long for a more detailed development of this interpretive line. Unfortunately, this notion has no real ancient authority. But Aristotle mentions Parmenides nowhere in the passage, and his complaint is in fact broadly directed against all the early Greek philosophers whose views he has been surveying previously in the book. He complains that they naively adopted the view that no fundamental entity or substance comes to be or perishes, the result being that they are unable to account for, because they disavow, substantial change, which is the very phenomenon Aristotle is most interested in explaining.
In the complex treatment of Parmenides in Physics 1. According to Aristotle, Melissus held that everything is a single, i. This is only a superficial difference, given how at Physics 1. Despite the assimilation of Melissus and Parmenides under the rubric inherited from Gorgias, Aristotle recognized that grouping the two figures together under this convenient label obscured fundamental differences in their positions. Among its species are strict monism or the position that just one thing exists.
This is the position Melissus advocated, one which no serious metaphysician should want to adopt. More familiar species include both numerical and generic substance monism, according to which, respectively, there is a single substance or a single kind of substance. Aristotle attributes to both Parmenides and Plato the recognition that knowledge requires as its objects certain natures or entities not susceptible to change—to Parmenides in De Caelo 3. This would be a rash conclusion, however, for Plato consistently represents Parmenides as a monist in later dialogues see, e.
There the One is shown to have a number of properties that reflect those Parmenides himself attributed to Being in the course of fr. In the Second Deduction, all these properties prove to belong to the One in virtue of its own nature and in relation to itself. Alexander of Aphrodisias quotes him as having written the following of Parmenides in the first book of his On the Natural Philosophers :. The passage on the whole suggests that, like Plato and Aristotle, Theophrastus understood Parmenides as furnishing dual accounts of the universe, first in its intelligible and then in its phenomenal aspects.
Both Plato and Aristotle understood Parmenides as perhaps the first to have developed the idea that apprehension of what is unchanging is of a different order epistemologically than apprehension of things subject to change.
More fundamentally, Plato and Aristotle both came to understand Parmenides as a type of generous monist whose conception of what is belongs more to theology or first philosophy than to natural science. None of these broad points, in other words, involves Plato or Aristotle viewing Parmenides through the distorting lens of their own concepetual apparatus. Numerous interpreters have variously resisted the idea that Parmenides meant to deny the very existence of the world we experience.
They have consequently advocated some more robust status for the cosmological portion of his poem. See, e. See also the proposal at Kahn , and n. In this omission they are not alone, of course, since none of the types of interpretation reviewed so far recognizes that Parmenides was the first philosopher rigorously to distinguish what must be, what must not be, and what is but need not be.
Empedocles fr. Comparison with fr. Each verse appears to demarcate a distinct modality or way of being. One might find it natural to call these modalities, respectively, the modality of necessary being and the modality of necessary non-being or impossibility. Parmenides conceives of these modalities as ways of being or ways an entity might be rather than as logical properties.
This specification indicates that what Parmenides is looking for is what is and cannot not be—or, more simply, what must be. Pursuing this way of inquiry requires maintaining a constant focus on the modality of the object of his search as he tries to attain a fuller conception of what an entity that is and cannot not be, or that must be, must be like. To remain on this path Parmenides must resolutely reject any conception of the object of his search that proves incompatible with its mode of being, as the goddess reminds him at numerous points.
What one looks for along this path of inquiry is what is and cannot not be, or, more simply, what must be. It is therefore appropriate to think of the first path as the path of necessary being and of what lies along it as what is what it is necessarily. What is and cannot not be will be whatever is what it is actually throughout the history of this world. There are of course other ways for things to be, but not, according to Parmenides, other ways for things to be such that apprehension of them will figure as understanding that does not wander.
The second way is introduced alongside the first because the modality of necessary non-being or impossibility specified in fr. Whatever thought there may be about what lies along this second way will be unwavering and, as such, will contrast with the wandering thought typical of mortals.
Even if the effort to think about what lies along the second way ends as it does in a total failure of apprehension, this non-apprehension remains unwavering. Inquiry along the second way involves, first, keeping in mind that what one is looking for is not and must not be, and thereby trying to discover what an entity that is in this way must be like.
It is immediately evident, though, what an entity that is not and must not be is like: nothing at all. The goddess warns Parmenides not to set out on the second way because there is no prospect of finding or forming any conception of what must not be.
She thus tells Parmenides at fr. She says, again, at fr. One cannot, in fact, form any definite conception of what is not and must not be, and a fortiori one cannot indicate it in any way.
Try to picture a round square, or to point one out to someone else. Parmenides has not fallen prey here to the purportedly paradoxical character of negative existential statements but makes a perfectly acceptable point about the inconceivability of what necessarily is not.
Before undertaking to guide Parmenides toward a fuller conception of what is and cannot not be, the goddess properly warns him away from a third possible path of inquiry in fragments 6 and 7, while at the same time reminding him of the imperative to think of what is in the manner specified in fr. Here to eon functions as a shorthand designation for what is in the way specified in fr. This is her essential directive to Parmenides regarding how to pursue the first path of inquiry.
The goddess also indicates in this fragment that the second major phase of her revelation will proceed along the path typically pursued by mortals whose reliance upon sensation has yielded only wandering understanding. The sense of this difficult clause seems to be that mortals mistakenly suppose that an object of genuine understanding may be subject to the variableness implicit in their conception of it as being and not being the same, and being and not being not the same.
This is not to say that the things upon which ordinary humans have exclusively focused their attention, because of their reliance upon sensation, do not exist. It is merely to say that they do not enjoy the mode of necessary being required of an object of unwandering understanding. The imagery in fr. Even so, the goddess does not say that mortals have no apprehension. Understanding that wanders is still understanding. The goddess reveals to Parmenides, however, the possibility of achieving understanding that does not wander or that is stable and unchanging, precisely because its object is and cannot not be what it is.
The third way of inquiry can never lead to this, and thus it is not presented by the goddess as a path of inquiry for understanding. The problem with this path is not, as too many interpreters have understood it to be, that nothing exists to be discovered along this way. There are innumerably many things that are and exist in the manner specified at fr. However, since their being is merely contingent, Parmenides thinks there can be no stable apprehension of them, no thoughts about them that remain steadfast and do not wander, and thus no true or reliable conviction.
This is why he has the goddess repeatedly characterize the cosmology in the second phase of her revelation as deceptive or untrustworthy. At the same time, however, Parmenides supposed there was more to the world than all those things that have grown, now are, and will hereafter end as he describes them in fragment There is also what is what it is and cannot not be what it is.
The goddess leads Parmenides to form a conception of the attributes whatever must be has to possess just in virtue of its mode of being. If one appreciates that Parmenides is concerned with determining what can be inferred about the nature or character of What Is simply from its mode of being, one can see that he is in fact entitled to the inferences he draws in the major deductions of fragment 8.
Certainly what must be cannot have come to be, nor can it cease to be. Both possibilities are incompatible with its mode of being. Likewise, what must be cannot change in any respect, for this would involve its not being what it is, which is also incompatible with its mode of being, since what must be must be what it is. On the assumption, inevitable at the time, that it is a spatially extended or physical entity, certain other attributes can also be inferred.
These explanations, whether they represent a summary of popular beliefs, Pythagorean thought, or Parmenides's own attempts to explain the world in the most plausible way through the use of the necessarily false senses, contain a few shrewd observations in an astronomical scheme that is impossible to reconstruct. Underlying all physical reality are the external opposites, Fire and Darkness.
A mixture of the two governs the makeup of all organic life. Parmenides's importance lies in his insistence on the separation of the intellect and the senses. His allegorical discussion of the paths of thought represents the earliest attempt to deal with the problems of philosophical method.
The extant fragments of Parmenides's poem are collected in Hermann Diels, ed. Excellent discussions and commentaries on Parmenides are in G. Kirk and J. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers , and W.
0コメント