PARMENIDES

PHILOSOPHY: Parmenides of Elea was

a Presocratic Greek philosopher. As the first philosopher to
inquire into the nature of existence itself, he is incontrovertibly
credited as the “Father of Metaphysics.” As the first to employ
deductive, a prioriarguments to justify his claims, he competes
with Aristotle for the title “Father of Logic.” He is also commonly
thought of as the founder of the “Eleatic School” of thought—a
philosophical label ascribed to Presocratics who purportedly
argued that reality is in some sense a unified and unchanging singular entity. This has often been
understood to mean there is just one thing in all of existence. In light of this questionable
interpretation, Parmenides has traditionally been viewed as a pivotal figure in the history of
philosophy: one who challenged the physical systems of his predecessors and set forth for his
successors the metaphysical criteria any successful system must meet. Other thinkers, also commonly
thought of as Eleatics, include: Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Samos, and (more
controversially) Xenophanes of Colophon.
Parmenides’ only written work is a poem entitled, supposedly, but likely erroneously, On Nature.Only
a limited number of “fragments” (more precisely, quotations by later authors) of his poem are still in
existence, which have traditionally been assigned to three main sections—Proem, Reality(Alétheia),
and Opinion (Doxa). The Proem (prelude) features a young man on a cosmic (perhaps spiritual)
journey in search of enlightenment, expressed in traditional Greek religious motifs and geography.
This is followed by the central, most philosophically-oriented section (Reality). Here, Parmenides
positively endorses certain epistemic guidelines for inquiry, which he then uses to argue for his
famous metaphysical claims—that “what is” (whatever is referred to by the word “this”) cannot be in
motion, change, come-to-be, perish, lack uniformity, and so forth. The final section (Opinion)
concludes the poem with a theogonical and cosmogonical account of the world, which paradoxically
employs the very phenomena (motion, change, and so forth) that Reality
seems to have denied. Furthermore, despite making apparently true claims (for example, the moon
gets its light from the sun), the account offered in Opinion is supposed to be representative of the
mistaken “opinions of mortals,” and thus is to be rejected on some level.
All three sections of the poem seem particularly contrived to yield a cohesive and unified thesis.
However, discerning exactly what that thesis is supposed to be has proven a vexing, perennial
problem since ancient times. Even Plato expressed reservations as to whether Parmenides’ “noble
depth” could be understood at all—and Plato possessed Parmenides’ entire poem, a blessing denied to
modern scholars. Although there are many important philological and philosophical questions
surrounding Parmenides’ poem, the central question for Parmenidean studies is addressing how the
positively-endorsed, radical conclusions of Reality can be adequately reconciled with the seemingly
contradictory cosmological account Parmenides rejects in Opinion. The primary focus of this article is
to provide the reader with sufficient background to appreciate this interpretative problem and the
difficulties with its proposed solutions.