Parmenides of Elea: A text and translation with an introduction
(David Gallop provides a Greek text and a new facing-page ...)
David Gallop provides a Greek text and a new facing-page translation of the extant fragments of Parmenides' philosophical poem. He also includes the first complete translation into English of the contexts in which the fragments have been transmitted to us, and of the ancient testimonia regarding Parmenides' life and thought. All of the fragments have been translated in full and are arranged in the order that has become canonical since the publication of the fifth edition of Diels-Rranz's Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Alternative renderings are provided for passages whose meaning is disputed or where major questions of interpretation hinge upon the text or translation adopted.
(Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus the most...)
Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus the most important of the pre-Socratic philosophers, were at the same time among the greatest poets of the ancient world. But their work is rarely treated and still more rarely translated in its original form - as poetry. The complete extant fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles are collected here for the first time in a translation responsive to the original verse texts. Parmenides' philosophical fragments are here given as the poetic remains of the thinker from Elea in Southern Italy whom Socrates wondered at and Plato held in awe.
Parmenides of Elea was a Presocratic Greek philosopher, who founded Eleaticism, one of the leading pre-Socratic schools of Greek thought. His general teaching has been diligently reconstructed from the few surviving fragments of his principal work, a lengthy three-part verse composition titled On Nature.
Background
Parmenides was born in the city of Elea after which his school of philosophy is named. Elea was located in a region of western Italy which was a Greek colony at the time. The date of his birth is somewhat uncertain, but it was almost certainly between 515 and 540 B.C.
His family was wealthy and commanded a high social status. This allowed Parmenides to concentrate on intellectual and educational pursuits rather than the common labor or military conscription of the lower classes.
Education
Parmenides may have been a student of another giant of ancient Greek thought, Xenophanes, who was a well-known poet, theologian, and social critic. While it is uncertain if Parmenides knew Xenophanes personally, there is no doubt he was exposed to and greatly influenced by the elder thinker’s work.
Career
According to Diogenes Laertius, Parmenides composed only a single work. This was a metaphysical and cosmological poem in the traditional epic medium of hexameter verse. The title On Nature under which it was transmitted is probably not authentic. The poem originally extended to perhaps eight hundred verses, roughly one hundred and sixty of which have survived as “fragments” that vary in length from a single word to the sixty-two verses of fragment 8. That any portion of his poem survives is due entirely 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. Sextus Empiricus quotes thirty of the thirty-two verses of fragment 1 (the opening Proem of the poem), though apparently from some sort of Hellenistic digest rather than from an actual manuscript copy, for his quotation of fr. 1.1-30 continues uninterruptedly with five and a half verses from fragments 7 and 8. The Alexandrian Neoplatonist Simplicius appears to have possessed a good copy of the work, from which he quoted extensively in his commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and De Caelo. He introduces his lengthy quotation of fr. 8.1-52 as follows: "Even if one might think it pedantic, I would gladly transcribe in this commentary the verses of Parmenides on the one being, which aren’t numerous, both as evidence for what I have said and because of the scarcity of Parmenides’ treatise." Thanks to Simplicius’ lengthy transcription, we appear to have the entire Parmenides’ major metaphysical argument demonstrating the attributes of "What Is" (to eon) or "true reality (alêtheia).
We are much less well informed about the cosmology Parmenides expounded in the latter part of the poem and so must supplement the primary evidence of the fragments with testimonia, that is, with various reports or paraphrases of his theories that we also find in later authors. (A number of these testimonia are collected among the fifty-four "A-Fragmente" in the Parmenides section of Diels and Kranz’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. A more comprehensive collection of testimonia, with English translations, is to be found in Coxon 2009, 99–267.) As always when dealing with an ancient philosopher whose work has not survived entire, one must take into account how the philosophical and other concerns of later authors thanks to whom we know what we do of Parmenides’ original poem are likely to have shaped the transmission of the extant fragments and testimonia. Certainly, the partial and imperfect preservation of his poem is one factor that complicates the understanding of his thought.
Very little is known about the personal life of Parmenides. The dates of his death are generally not given in most historical accounts, although he probably lived to an advanced age. Many of his philosophical ideas, however, still stand today and they are still being discussed 25 centuries after his death.
As the first philosopher to inquire into the nature of existence itself, he is incontrovertibly credited as the "Father of Metaphysics." As the first to employ deductive, a priori arguments to justify his claims, he competes with Aristotle for the title "Father of Logic."
(David Gallop provides a Greek text and a new facing-page ...)
Views
Parmenides of Elea is commonly thought of as the founder of the "Eleatic School" of thought - a philosophical label ascribed to Presocratics who purportedly argued that reality is in some sense a unified and unchanging singular entity. This has often been understood to mean there is just one thing in all of existence. In light of this questionable interpretation, Parmenides has traditionally been viewed as a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy: one who challenged the physical systems of his predecessors and set forth for his successors the metaphysical criteria any successful system must meet. Other thinkers, also commonly thought of as Eleatics, include Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Samos, and (more controversially) Xenophanes of Colophon.
Parmenides’ only written work is a poem entitled, supposedly, but likely erroneously, On Nature. Only a limited number of "fragments" (more precisely, quotations by later authors) of his poem are still in existence, which have traditionally been assigned to three main sections - Proem, Reality (Alétheia), and Opinion (Doxa). The Proem (prelude) features a young man on a cosmic (perhaps spiritual) journey in search of enlightenment, expressed in traditional Greek religious motifs and geography. This is followed by the central, most philosophically-oriented section (Reality). Here, Parmenides positively endorses certain epistemic guidelines for inquiry, which he then uses to argue for his famous metaphysical claims - that "what is" (whatever is referred to by the word "this") cannot be in motion, change, come-to-be, perish, lack uniformity, and so forth. The final section (Opinion) concludes the poem with a theogonical and cosmogonical account of the world, which paradoxically employs the very phenomena (motion, change, and so forth) that Reality seems to have denied. Furthermore, despite making apparently true claims (for example, the moon gets its light from the sun), the account offered in Opinion is supposed to be representative of the mistaken “opinions of mortals,” and thus is to be rejected on some level.
All three sections of the poem seem particularly contrived to yield a cohesive and unified thesis. However, discerning exactly what that thesis is supposed to be has proven a vexing, perennial problem since ancient times. Even Plato expressed reservations as to whether Parmenides’ "noble depth" could be understood at all - and Plato possessed Parmenides’ entire poem, a blessing denied to modern scholars. Although there are many important philological and philosophical questions surrounding Parmenides’ poem, the central question for Parmenidean studies is addressing how the positively-endorsed, radical conclusions of Reality can be adequately reconciled with the seemingly contradictory cosmological account Parmenides rejects in Opinion.
Quotations:
"And what need would have driven him to be born sooner or later, starting from nothing?"
"A single narrative path remains: what it is. And on this road, there are abundant signs."
"The same remains in the same and rests in itself."
"The same can be learned and can be."
"A single story remains as a way: the entity is."
"It is indifferent to me where I begin; because, I’ll be back there again."
"You will know the ethereal nature and, also in the ether, all the signs and the destructive effects of the pure and bright torch of the sun and from where they have been generated."
"For there is neither nor will be anything alien apart from what is."
"The same can be learned and can be."
"The mares that take me as far as my spirit reached me transported me when, as they led me, they brought me to the road, abundant in signs of the goddess."
"Everything that exists has always existed. Nothing can come from nothing. And something that exists cannot become anything either."
"The reason will end up being right."
"The universe, for those who knew how to embrace it from a single point of view, would not be, if I were allowed to say it, more than a single fact and a great truth."
"Music that does not describe something is nothing but noise."
"War is the art of destroying men, and politics is the art of deceiving them."
"The same is thinking and being."
Connections
If Parmenides was married and had children is unknown.
