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Parmenides of Elea, an ancient Greek philosopher was a student of Ameinias and the founder of the School of Elea, whose students came to be known as Eleatics, which included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos.
Parmenides is one of the most significant of the pre-Socratic philosophers; however, of his known work only the conventionally titled 'On Nature' (written between 480 and 470 BCE) has survived in a meagre form. Only 150 lines of the original 3,000 lines poem remain today.
Parmenides was said to be a prophet, magician and healer (like Pythagoras, Empedocles and many others), and his philosophy is presented in verse, through mythology and obscure mystic visions. He claimed the philosophy was given to him directly by the Goddess of the underworld (Tartaros).
It is with respect to this religious/mystical context that recent generations of scholars have sought to minimise his traditional, rational - logical - philosophical interpretation, claiming 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. Despite the obscurity and fragmentary state of the text, it 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.
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. Since he argues that 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 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.
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.
Moreover he argued that movement was impossible because it requires moving into "the void", and Parmenides identified "the void" with nothing, and therefore 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 (senses) vs. Logos (rationality)
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 - are deceptive. We may see, for example, tables being made from wood and then destroyed, and speak of birth and demise; but this belongs to the superficial world of movement and change. 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 through reasoning, not through sense-perception.The World of Seeming: Parmenides' cosmogony After the exposition of the the origin, the necessary part of reality that is understood through reason or logos (that which “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", 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 yin-yang idea in Chinese cosmogony.
The mortals lay down and decided to name two forms, out of which it is necessary not to make one, and in this they are led astray.
Aetius of Antioch (350 CE, surnamed "the Atheist"), commented: “Parmenides says that there are coronas one enveloping or encircling another, one formed of rare [yang], and the other of dense [yin], others, mixed form of light and darkness, are in the middle.”
SOURCES:
www.iep.utm.edu/a/parmenid.htm
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parminides
