Parmenides

c. 515 - c. 450 BCE · Greek (Elean) · Presocratic metaphysics

It is the same thing to think and to be.

Around 475 BCE, in the Greek colony of Elea, a man wrote a hexameter poem that stopped Western philosophy in its tracks. Parmenides was reacting against the Milesian tradition — Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes — who explained the cosmos as a process of change and becoming. His answer: genuine becoming is impossible, and the routes of inquiry are few, perhaps only one.

Topics Parmenides addresses

• the way of truth
• the way of opinion
• what-is (to eon)
• the meaning of esti
• the routes of inquiry
• the semata of being
• ungenerated and imperishable
• whole and of a single kind
• immovable and complete
• the well-rounded sphere
• monism
• numerical monism
• predicational monism
• the modal interpretation
• thinking and being
• the proem and the chariot journey
• the goddess and the kouros
• the doxa
• light and night
• mortal opinion and error
• the cosmology of mortals
• change and motion
• the denial of becoming
• the eleatic school

Converse with Parmenides on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Parmenides's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.