Parmenides – On Nature
Parmenides likely lived between circa 515 BCE and 450 BCE, with his intellectual prime around 475 BCE. He was born in Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy, and is considered the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, which emphasized the unity and unchanging nature of being.
🧠 Philosophical Significance
Parmenides’ surviving work, a poem often called On Nature, presents two paths:
– The Way of Truth (Aletheia): Reality is one, eternal, and unchanging.
– The Way of Opinion (Doxa): The world of appearances is deceptive and illusory.
This radical claim—that change is impossible and being is indivisible—directly challenged thinkers like Heraclitus and laid the groundwork for Plato’s metaphysics and Zeno’s paradoxes.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides
The Muses of Hesiod even specify something similar to what the Parmenidean goddess said about true and apparent speech: «We know how to tell many lies with appearances of truth; and we know, when we want, to proclaim the truth» (Thegony, vv. 27ff).
SNIP
B2
Proclus preserves, in his commentary on Timaeus I 345, 18–20, two lines of Parmenides’s poem, which together with six lines transmitted by Simplicius, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, 116, 28–32–117, 1, form fragment 2 (28 B 2). There the goddess speaks of two “paths of inquiry that there are for thinking (nous)”. The first is named as follows: “which is, and also cannot be that it is not” (v. 3); the second: “which is not, and also, must not be” (v. 5). The first way is “of persuasion”, which “accompanies the truth” (v. 4), while the second is “completely inscrutable” or “impracticable”, since “what is not” cannot be known, nor expressed (vv. 6–8).
B6
In fragment B6, nine verses preserved by Simplicius,[83] Parminides continues to speak of the ways of thought. The first three verses argue against the second way, presented in B 2, v. 5: Postulates that it is necessary to think and say that “what is” is, since it is possible that it is, while it is impossible for “nothing” to be. And this is the reason why the goddess removes the “man who knows” from the second way. Immediately, the goddess speaks of a third path that must be left aside: the one in which mortals wander, wandering since they are dragged by a wavering mind, which considers that being and not being are the same, and at the same time it is not the same. himself (vv. 4–9). It is the way of opinion, already presented in B 1, v. 30. Fragment 6 has been interpreted by some philologists as a reference to the thought of Heraclitus. There it speaks of the “two-faced” (δίκρανοι v. 5), those who believe that “being and not being is the same and not the same” (vv. 8–9). This appears to be a criticism of the Heraclitean doctrine of the unity of opposites.[k] Verse 9 “from all things there is a retrograde way” (πἄντων δὲ παλίντροπός ἐστι κέλευθος), seems to point directly to an idea present in a fragment of Heraclitus: (22 B 60): “the up way and below is one and the same»; and to the same letter of another fragment (22 B 51): “…harmony of that which turns back» (παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη).[84]