Warning: Parmenides’ philosophy and writing can be very challenging. In this guide, I have chosen to pitch his ideas at a level somewhere between advanced beginner and intermediate to give you a sense of the depth, difficulty, and importance of Parmenides thought and text. Part of the reason for this is that is to counter-balance a tendency that first-time readers have in which they dismiss his work as mere “word-play”. In my judgment, the problems raised by Parmenides’ poem are so significant and fundamental that they go far deeper than mere words, they allow us to think beyond language itself.
While Heraclitus was the first great philosopher, Parmenides was the second. In my judgment, he was also greatest of all philosophers in the Western tradition before Socrates (the group of philosophers called “The Pre-Socratics”). But with philosophical greatness comes great difficulty. In Parmenides’ case, the difficulty is primarily due to the way in which he forces us to consider the absolute limits of human thinking. Never before had a human being ventured so far beyond language and tradition in order to try and convey ultimate truth.
In the Greek/European tradition, there is simply philosophy before Parmenides and after Parmenides.
There are three primary reasons Parmenides was so significant:
First and foremost, his writings are the earliest evidence we have of a strange and powerful use of human reasoning called deductive argument. Deductive argumentation would go on to provide the foundation not just for philosophy, but mathematical and logical reasoning.
Second, Parmenides presents arguments for genuinely striking and original metaphysical and epistemological conclusions that continue to influence modern discussions of existence, possibility, nothingness, change, identity, thought, and language. While contemporary philosophers have developed a more sophisticated toolkit to analyze the questions and problems first raised by Parmenides, many of his ideas are still in the background of contemporary discussions.
Third, Parmenides’ arguments were viewed as a profound and puzzling intellectual challenge that many of his immediate successors responded to directly. The result of the response, and the efforts to understand where Parmenides went wrong, led to major innovations by figures such as Empedocles, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and future thinkers.
As far as we know, Parmenides was born around 515 BCE and lived until roughly 450 BCE in the Greek city of Elea in southern Italy.
Elea became known (among other things) for it’s intellectual culture of rigorous and abstract reasoning in support of paradoxical conclusions.
One of Parmenides followers, who was also from Elea, was the famous Zeno. Zeno who would go on to became remembered for his philosophical and logical paradoxes (some of which are still puzzling to modern logicians and philosophers).
The strong culture created by thinkers from Elea has led historians to refer to Parmenides and related figures as belonging to a philosophical school called, unsurprisingly, “the Eleatic school”. The thinkers from the Eleatic school were widely known and respected. For example, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote an entire work dedicated to Parmenides in which he set up a fictional conversation between Parmenides and a young Socrates.
According to Diogenes Laertius, Parmenides composed only a single work which was a metaphysical and cosmological poem in the traditional verse of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
The poem, which consists of only hundred and sixty surviving “fragments”, was originally longer than what we have today. While it’s always unfortunate to have lost ancient works, the good news is that fragment B8, which I will focus on in this article, is the longest surviving fragment in Pre-Socratic philosophy spanning sixty-two verses.
The fact that any portion of his poem survives is an absolute miracle (as is the case with most ancient texts). In Parmenides case, the survival of his poem is largely due to the fact that later ancient authors, beginning with Plato, for one reason or another felt the need to quote some portion of it in the course of their own writings. For example, Simplicius wrote down a lengthy transcription of the poem in a book on Aristotle simply to make sure it wasn’t lost.
Parmenides is famous for his systematic use of a rigorous deductive arguments to arrive at strange and counter-intuitive conclusions about thought and reality. After Parmenides, this style of argument and reasoning would become one of the most powerful and widely used philosophical methods. Philosophers today continue to use Parmenides’ style of argument on a regular basis.
The reason that deductive argument is so powerful and characteristic of philosophy is that it allows an individual thinker to reach justified conclusions without relying solely upon empirical evidence or justification. The aim of a deductive argument is to reach a meaningful conclusion through pure thinking (an important point of clarification here: this doesn’t mean you can’t talk at all about things you experience or observe, it just means that the justification comes from the logical reasoning rather than from the observational evidence).
An argument is commonly understood as a set of claims aimed at supporting a conclusion.
You can learn about what an argument is and is-not by watching the video below:
A deductive argument is a special kind of argument according to which the truth of the claims necessarily guarantees the truth of the conclusion. For example, if I said that John is taller than Jim, and Jim is taller than Joe, then you could, by way of deductive reasoning, conclude that it must be the case that Jim is taller than Joe (assuming the earlier statements are true).
That’s how deductive argument works and this form of reasoning is believed by many philosophers to be airtight.
Parmenides relied upon deductive reasoning in service of trying to answer three gigantic philosophical questions:
What conditions must something satisfy to exist?
Is reality what our senses tell us it is?
What is the relationship between thought and reality?
In pursuing the answer to these questions, Parmenides would touch upon the following major themes: being, coming-to-be, perishing, language, change, motion, time, and space.
Parmenides discussion of these themes has earned him the label of “the inventor of metaphysics”. I like to call him the “grandfather” of metaphysics since he was a little bit off his rocker.
Metaphysics is one of the main branches of philosophy.
