Parmenides Flashcards
When did Parmenides live?
510 - 430 B.C.
Where did Parmenides live?
In Elea, which is in Southern Italy
How did Parmenides agree with Heraclitus?
He agreed that reasoning required something changeless.
But how did Parmenides differ from Heraclitus?
He denied the existence of change all together
What did he write in his poem?
He described an encounter with a goddess, who reveals to him that ‘being is’. This goddess does not do this through her own revelation, but only by appealing to reason.
What does Parmenides mean by the phrase, ‘being is’?
Nothing can change from what it ‘is’ to what it ‘is not’. E.g., red cannot change into green, for then red would be ‘non-red’, or ‘non-green’ would become green.
So what is the impact of the phrase ‘being is’, upon Parmenide’s worldview?
Change cannot be real. It instead must be an illusion. There is no such thing as ‘non-being’, for that would be a change from ‘being’.
According to Parmenides, what is the real world, then?
It is ungenerated, homogeneous (of the same kind), solid, symmetrical, spherical.
Why does Parmenide’s worldview have to involve reality as homogeneous, etc.?
If water, for example, was combined with something else to make something, this something else would be ‘non-water’, which cannot exist, according to Parmenides, by way of example.
What does Parmenides call his beliefs regarding the nature of reality?
The ‘way of truth’.
But aside from the way of truth, what also did Parmenides believe in?
The ‘way of belief’, or the ‘way of opinion’.
What is the ‘Way of belief’?
A cosmology also revealed by a goddess which includes change, which Parmenides most likely rejected. (He may have maintained its use it as a practical guide, etc., however.)
What else did Parmenides maintain that there could be no difference between?
‘What is’, and ‘What can be thought’.
In doing all of this, what did Parmenides effectively deny?
The use of the empirical senses, as all was, in essence, the same. All foreseeable change was an illusion.
What was a problem for Parmenides?
If all was the same, including rational thought itself, then how could we progress in our thinking? Our thinking would have to be an illusion too - undermining the way in which he reaches his conclusion regarding the nature of reality.
