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Parmenides

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For the Platonic dialogue see Parmenides (dialogue).
Template:Polytonic
EraPre-Socratic philosophy
RegionWestern Philosophy
SchoolEleatic school
Main interests
metaphysics
Notable ideas
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Parmenides of Elea (Greek: Template:Polytonic, early 5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Hellenic city on the southern coast of Italy. Parmenides was a student of Ameinias and the founder of the School of Elea, which also included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos.

Overview

Parmenides is one of the most significant of the pre-Socratic philosophers. His only known work, conventionally titled 'On Nature' is a poem, which has only survived in fragmentary form. Approximately 150 lines of the poem remain today; reportedly the original text had 3,000 lines. It is known, however, that the work originally divided into three parts:

  • A proem, which introduced the entire work,
  • A section known as "The way of truth" (aletheia), and
  • A section known as "The way of appearance/opinion" (doxa).

The poem is a narrative sequence in which the narrator travels "beyond the beaten paths of mortal men" to receive a revelation from an unnamed goddess (generally thought to be Persephone) on the nature of reality. Aletheia, an estimated 90% of which has survived, and doxa, most of which no longer exists, are then presented as the spoken revelation of the goddess without any accompanying narrative.

Interpretations of Parmenides

The traditional interpretation of Parmenides' extremely obscure and esoteric work is that he argued that the every-day perception of reality of the physical world (as described in doxa) is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is 'One Being' (as described in aletheia): an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole. Under 'way of seeming', Parmenides set out a contrasting but more conventional view of the world, thereby becoming an early exponent of the duality of appearance and reality. For him and his pupils the phenomena of movement and change are simply appearances of a static, eternal reality.

Parmenides was said to be a prophet, magician and healer (just like Pythagoras, Empedocles and many others), and his philosophy is presented in verse, through mythology and obscure mystic visions. The philosophy he argued was, he says, given to him by the Goddess of the underworld (Tartaros):

Welcome, youth, who come attended by immortal charioteers and mares which bear you on your journey to our dwelling. For it is no evil fate that has set you to travel on this road, far from the beaten paths of men, but right and justice. It is meet that you learn all things - both the unshakable heart of well-rounded truth and the opinions of mortals in which there is not true belief.

It is with respect to this religious/mystical context that recent generations of scholars such as Alexander P. Mourelatos, Charles H. Kahn and the controversial Peter Kingsley have begun to call parts of the traditional, rational logical/philosophical interpretation of Parmenides into question. It has been claimed, for instance, that previous scholars placed too little emphasis on the apocalyptic context in which Parmenides frames his revelation. As a result, traditional interpretations have put Parmenidean philosophy into a more modern, metaphysical context to which it is not necessarily well suited, which has led to misunderstanding of the true meaning and intention of Parmenides' message. The obscurity and fragmentary state of the text, however, renders almost every claim that can be made about Parmenides extremely contentious, and the traditional interpretation has by no means been completely abandoned.

Parmenides' considerable influence on the thinking of Plato is undeniable, and in this respect Parmenides has influenced the whole history of Western philosophy, and is often seen as its grandfather. Even Plato himself, in the Sophist, refers to the work of "our Father Parmenides" as something to be taken very seriously and treated with respect. In the Parmenides the Eleatic philosopher, which may well be Parmenides himself, and Socrates argue about dialectic. In the Theaetetus, Socrates says that Parmenides alone among the wise (Protagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Epicharmus, and Homer) denied that everything is change and motion.

Many philosophers after Parmenides used parts of his theory to construct their own. These philosophers include: Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus. [citation needed]

Parmenides. Detail from The School of Athens by Raphael.

Arguments by Parmenides

The Way of Truth discusses that which is real, which contrasts in some way with the argument of the Way of Seeming, which discusses that which is illusory. Under the Way of Truth, Parmenides stated that there are two ways of inquiry: that it is, that it is not. He said that the latter argument is never feasible because nothing can not be:

For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are.

There are extremely delicate issues here. In the original Greek the two ways are simply named "that Is" (hopos estin) and "that Not-Is" (hos ouk estin) (Frag. 2. 3 and 2. 5) without the "it" inserted in our English translation. In ancient Greek, which, like many languages in the world, does not always require the presence of a subject for a verb, "is" functions as a grammatically complete sentence. A lot of debate has been focused on where and what the subject is. The simplest explanation as to why there is no subject here is that Parmenides wishes to express the simple, bare fact of existence in his mystical experience without the ordinary distinctions, just as the Latin "pluit" and the Greek uei ("rains") mean "it rains"; there is no subject for these impersonal verbs because they express the simple fact of raining without specifying what is doing the raining. This is, for instance, Hermann Fraenkel's thesis (Dichtung und Philosophie des fruehen Griechentums, 1962) [1] But many scholars still reject this explanation and have produced more complex metaphysical explanations. Since existence is an immediately intuited fact, non-existence is the wrong path because something cannot ever disappear just as something cannot ever come from nothing. In such mystical experience (unio mystica), however, the distinction between subject and object disappears along with the distinctions between objects, in addition to the fact that if nothing cannot be, it cannot be the object of thought either:

Thinking and the thought that it is are the same; for you will not find thought apart from what is, in relation to which it is uttered.
For thought and being are the same.
It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not.
Helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts; they are carried along deaf and blind alike, dazed, beasts without judgment, convinced that to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and that the road of all things is a backward-turning one.

Thus, he concluded that "Is" could not have "come into being" because "nothing comes from nothing." Existence is necessarily eternal. (Parmenides, therefore, with many other early philosophers in both the East and West, was struggling with a principal law of nature which today is formulated as the conservation of mass-energy. The physicist Alan Guth has said this in the beginning of his book The Inflationary Universe.)

Moreover he argued that movement was impossible because it requires moving into "the void", and Parmenides identified "the void" with nothing, and therefore (by definition) it does not exist. That which does exist is The Parmenidean One which is timeless, uniform, and unchanging:

How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown.
Nor was [it] once, nor will [it] be, since [it] is, now, all together, / One, continuous; for what coming-to-be of it will you seek? / In what way, whence, did [it] grow? Neither from what-is-not shall I allow / You to say or think; for it is not to be said or thought / That [it] is not. And what need could have impelled it to grow / Later or sooner, if it began from nothing? Thus [it] must either be completely or not at all.
[What exists] is now, all at once, one and continuous... Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is.
And it is all one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again.

Perception vs. Logos

Parmenides claimed that the truth cannot be known through sensory perception. Only pure reason (Logos) will result in the understanding of the truth of the world. This is because the perception of things or appearances (the doxa) is deceptive. We may see, for example, tables being made from wood and destroyed, and speak of birth and demise; this belongs to the superficial world of movement and change. But this genesis-and-destruction, as Parmenides emphasizes, is illusory, because the underlying material of which the table is made will still exist after its destruction. What exists must always exist. And we arrive at the knowledge of this underlying, static, and eternal reality (aletheia) through reasoning, not through sense-perception.

For this view, that That Which Is Not exists, can never predominate. You must debar your thought from this way of search, nor let ordinary experience in its variety force you along this way, (namely, that of allowing) the eye, sightless as it is, and the ear, full of sound, and the tongue, to rule; but (you must) judge by means of the Reason (Logos) the much-contested proof which is expounded by me.

The world of seeming (doxa): Parmenides' cosmogony

After the exposition of the arche, i.e. the origin, the necessary part of reality that is understood through reason or logos (that [it] Is) , in the next section, the Way of Appearance/Opinion/Seeming, Parmenides proceeds to explain the structure of the becoming cosmos (which is an illusion, of course) that comes from this origin.

The structure of the cosmos is a fundamental binary principle that governs the manifestations of all the particulars: "the aither fire of flame" (8, 56), which is gentle, mild, soft, thin and clear, and self-identical -- this is something like the masculine principle -- and the other is "ignorant night", body thick and heavy -- this is something like the feminine principle. Thus Parmenides' cosmogony is exactly like the ying-yang picture in Chinese cosmogony.

The mortals lay down and decided well to name two forms (i.e. the flaming light and obscure darkness of night), out of which it is necessary not to make one, and in this they are led astray. (8, 53-4)

The structure of the cosmos then generated is recollected by Aetius (II, 7, 1):

Parmenides says that there are coronas one enveloping or encircling another,one formed of rare [yang], and the other of dense [ying], others, mixed form of light and darkness, are in the middle. And Parmenides provides, surrounding all these, a [corona like a] wall of some kind, solid and just, under which is a corona of fire. And what is in the most center of all this [the core, kernel of the cosmos in the corona form] is again encircled by [a corona] of fire. And he provides the most middle [layer of corona] of the mixed coronas as the progenitor, for all beings, of all the movements and all the generations. He calls this [middle progenitor layer of corona] the goddess (daimona) that governs or that holds the key, or Justice (diken) or Necessity (ananke). [2]

Influence on the development of science

  • In c.485 BC, Parmenides makes the ontological argument against nothingness, essentially denying the possible existence of a void.
  • Around the same time, he may have dealt with the viewpoint that the Earth was spherical, as opposed to the 'flat' Earth conception.[dubious – discuss]
  • In c.460 BC, Leucippus, in opposition to Parmenides' denial of the void, proposes the atomic theory, which supposes that everything in the universe is either atoms or voids; a theory which, according to Aristotle, was stimulated into conception so to purposely contradict Parmenides' argument.
  • In c.350 BC, Aristotle proclaims, in opposition to Leucippus, the dictum horror vacui or “nature abhors a vacuum”. Aristotle reasoned that in a complete vacuum, infinite speed would be possible because motion would encounter no resistance. Since he did not accept the possibility of infinite speed, he decided that a vacuum was equally impossible.
Schematic of Evangelista Torricelli's mercury column experiment
  • In 1643, Galileo Galilei, while generally accepting the horror vacui of Aristotle, believes that nature’s vacuum-abhorrence is limited. Pumps operating in mines had already proven that nature would only fill a vacuum with water up to a height of 30 feet. Knowing this curious fact, Galileo encourages his former pupil Evangelista Torricelli to investigate these supposed limitations. Torricelli did not believe that vacuum-abhorrence was responsible for raising the water. Rather, he reasoned, it was the result of the pressure exerted on the liquid by the surrounding air. To prove this theory, he filled a glass tube, sealed at one end, filled with mercury and upended it into a dish also containing mercury. Only a portion of the tube emptied (as shown adjacent); 30 inches of the liquid remained. As the mercury emptied, a vacuum was created at the top of the tube. This, the first man-made vacuum, effectively disproved Aristotle’s theory and affirmed the existence of vacuums in nature.
  • In 1650, Otto von Guericke, stimulated by the work Galileo and Torricelli, to further disprove Aristotle's supposition that nature abhors a vacuum, constructs the world’s first-ever vacuum pump and uses it to unite the Magdeburg Hemispheres. In doing so, von Guericke shows that in a vacuum sound cannot travel, candles could not burn, and animals could not live.
  • In 1656, Robert Boyle, having learned of von Guericke’s vacuum pump designs, works in coordination with Robert Hooke to build an air pump. Using this pump, Boyle and Hooke notice that vessels filled with air become warmer as their internal pressure is increased. In time, the ideal gas law is formulated.
  • In 1679, Denis Papin, an associate of Boyle's, uses the pressure-temperature correlation to build a bone digester, which is a closed vessel with a tightly fitting lid that confines steam until a high pressure is generated. Later designs implemented a steam release valve to keep the machine from exploding. By watching the valve rhythmically move up and down, Papin conceived of the idea of a piston and cylinder engine. He did not however follow through with his design.
  • In 1697, Thomas Savery, using Papin’s designs, builds the world’s first engine. In time, other engines were built as the Newcomen engine and the Watt engine. These early engines, however, were crude and inefficient, converting less than two percent of their input energy into useful work output. This efficiency problem soon began to attract the attention of the leading scientists of the day.
  • In 1824, Sadi Carnot, so as to put the engine-efficiency problem on a mathematical footing, publishes Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, a discourse on heat, power, and engine efficiency. This marks the start of thermodynamics as a modern science.
  • In 1867, Rudolf Clausius, situated on the work of Carnot, develops the concept of entropy, or energy lost to dissipation.
  • In 1876, Willard Gibbs, building on the work of Clausius, Carnot and others, publishes “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances”, a paper integrating chemical, physical, electrical, and electromagnetic phenomena into a cohesive system, and introduces the phase rule, which forms the basis for modern physical chemistry and thermochemistry.

Works

  • On Nature (written between 480 and 470 BC) [3]

References and further reading

  • Austin, Scott (1986). Parmenides: Being, Bounds and Logic. Yale University Press.
  • Bakalis Nikolaos (2005) Handbook of Greek Philosophy: From Thales to the Stoics Analysis and Fragments, Trafford Publishing, ISBN 1-4120-4843-5
  • Barnes, Jonathan (1978). The Presocratic Philosophers (Two Volumes). Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  • Burnet J. (2003) Early Greek Philosophy, Kessinger Publishing.
  • Cordero, Néstor-Luis (2004). By Being, It Is: The Thesis of Parmenides. Parmenides Publishing. {{cite book}}: External link in |publisher= (help) ISBN 978-1-930972-03-2 [4]
  • Coxon, A. H. (1986). The Fragments of Parmenides. Van Gorcum.
  • Curd, Patricia (2004). The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought. Parmenides Publishing. {{cite book}}: External link in |publisher= (help) ISBN 978-1-930972-15-5 [5]
  • Gallop David. (1991) Parmenides of Elea – Fragments, University of Toronto Press.
  • Guthrie W. K. (1979) A History of Greek Philosophy – The Presocratic tradition from Parmenides to Democritus, Cambridge University Press.
  • Hermann, Arnold (2005) To Think Like God: Pythagoras and Parmenides, The Origins of Philosophy, Parmenides Publishing. ISBN 978-1-930972-00-1 [6]
  • Kingsley, Peter (2003) Reality, Golden Sufi Center, ISBN 1-890350-09-5
  • Kingsley, Peter (2001). In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Duckwork and Co.
  • Kirk G. S., Raven J. E. and Schofield M. (1983) The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, Second edition.
  • Melchert, Norman (2002). The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-19-517510-7.
  • Mourelatos, Alexander P. D. (2007). The Route of Parmenides. Parmenides Publishing. {{cite book}}: External link in |publisher= (help) ISBN 978-1-930972-11-7 [7]
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Regnery Gateway ISBN 0-89526-944-9
  • Popper, Karl R. (1998). The World of Parmenides. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-17301-9.


An extensive bibliography is available here, an even more extensive here

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