Ancient Philosophy · Part 6 · The first philosophers · C1
Parmenides and Zeno: What Is, and the Paradoxes of Motion
Part 6 of Ancient Philosophy: in a small Greek town in southern Italy, Parmenides wrote a poem in which a goddess proves that nothing can come into being and nothing can change. His pupil Zeno defended him with paradoxes that still puzzle mathematicians. Logical necessity (it must be, it can’t be, it is impossible for…, it follows that…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the hardest argument in early philosophy, and the strangest conclusion: nothing ever changes.
Parmenides would say you only seem to have done so. And his pupil would prove that you can never reach the door.
Exactly the word. Let us see whose “impossible” wins.
Parmenides lived in Elea, a small Greek colony on the coast of southern Italy, in the early 5th century BCE. He wrote a philosophical poem in verse. About a hundred and sixty lines survive, many of them because the commentator Simplicius copied them, a thousand years later, from a rare copy.
In the poem, a young man travels in a chariot to a goddess, who teaches him two ways: the Way of Truth, which shows that what is must be one, whole, ungenerated and unchanging, and the Way of Opinion, the mistaken beliefs of mortals, who trust their senses.
His pupil Zeno of Elea defended these ideas with paradoxes, arguments showing that motion and plurality lead to absurd conclusions. Zeno’s own book is lost; we know his paradoxes mainly because Aristotle tried to refute them.
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