Jackson Rova, Peter. 2021. "The Secret of the Untrembling Heart: A Cryptological Reading of Parmenides’ Proem (EGP D4.29/DK B1.29)." Mnemosyne no. 74:737-756.

Abstract: "The poem by Parmenides is widely recognized as having a decisive influence on Greek philosophy. The text is also notorious for its interpretative problems owing to its obscure poetic style. Among the discordant quotes from the proem, Simplicius uniquely preserves a verse with the unparalleled genitive εὐκυκλέος (literally ‘of [the] well-wheeled’). Contrary to a recent editorial trend in opting for the lectio facilior εὐπειθέος (‘of [the] well-persuasive’), I argue in this paper that the lectio difficilior is genuine testimony to a poetic device designed by Parmenides to perform a pivotal role in the proemial structure as a whole, and to redeploy a key concept in archaic verbal art by means of paronomasia: the ‘glory’ (κλέος) conveyed through the costly medium of song. The proem thus gives characteristic voice to the experimental spirit of inquiry in which Parmenides variously challenged and took his cue from the conceptual framework of encomiastic performance."

DK = Diels, H., and Kranz, W., eds. (1952). Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Berlin.

EGP = Laks, A., and Most, G.W., eds. (2016). Early Greek Philosophy. Cambridge, MA.
Jacobs, David C. 1999. "The ontological education of Parmenides " In The Presocratics after Heidegger, edited by Jacobs, David C., 185-202. Albany: State University of New Yoek Press.

"In the history of philosophical reflection, Parmenides' pronouncement about the relationship between being and thinking stands as his pinnacle achievement. In his thinking, τό αύτό links being and thinking in their relationship as a belonging together and not as an identity.(1) Even with this novel reading of τό αύτό opened up by Heidegger and others, much still remains enigmatic about the relationship between being and thinking—and, since this relationship is the center of Parmenides' thinking, much still deserves careful attention in his thought. His Poem can be characterized as a depiction of a goddess instructing a youth on how to think τό έόν and mortal opinions. Focusing on this education on how to think τό έόν, we can see how the instruction moves or turns the youth's thought to think τό έόν in its presence with thought. However, if being and thinking belong together and are together in some sort of presence, which we will hold here, then a simple question arises: How are we to make sense of the fact that the Poem is an instruction that attempts to bring thought to being if being and thought always already belong together? We can think through this aporetic character of Parmenides' thought if we consider three things: first, we will examine what is said by Parmenides about the relationship between being and thinking; second, we will lay out the ontological education that Parmenides portrays as occurring between the goddess and the youth; and, third, we will re-think the relationship between being and thinking with the portrayal of the dispensation of τό έόν."

(1) Reading τό αύτό as a belonging together has also been pointed out by Heidegger in EGT, 87, and by T. M. Robinson, "Parmenides on Ascertainment of the Real," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 4 (June 1975), 627.

References

EGT = Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975).
Jameson, G. 1958. "'Well-Rounded Truth' and Circular Thought in Parmenides." Phronesis no. 3:15-30.

"Sufficient remains of Parmenides' poem for its general pattern to be evident. It falls into four sections:

1. The Proem (DK6 28 B 1).

2. A discussion of principles, which lays down certain axioms and traces their implications (B 2, 3, 6, 7).

3. A delineation of the properties of reality, from the starting-point dictated by Section 2 and according to the principles there stated (B 8. 1 -49).

4. A cosmogony (B 8.50-61, 9 ff.).

There are two fragments whose position is uncertain: B 4 and 5. I shall be discussing frg. 5 at length in a moment. Frg. 4 has no implications disruptive of any conclusions that can be drawn from the other fragments, nor is its presence inconsistent with the general scheme of the poem. Its location is a problem, but one which, for the present, can be left on one side." (p. 15)

(...)

"It is my purpose to discuss two passages in the fragments from which conclusions are usually drawn which conflict with the general pattern of Parmenides' thought and argument. They appear in DK as:

B 1. 29: Ἀληθείης εὐκυκλέος ἀτρεμὲς ἦτορ

and B 5: Ξυνὸν δὲ μοί ἐστιν, ὁππόθεν ἄρξωμαι· τόθι γὰρ πάλιν ἵξομαι αὖθις.

These passages have received various interpretations, sometimes separately, sometimes in combination. I shall suggest that frg. 5 should be treated as a doubtful fragment and that at 1.29 the correct reading is ευπειθεος not ευκυκλεως." (p. 16)
Janko, Richard. 2016. "Parmenides in the Derveni Papyrus: New Images for a New Edition." Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik no. 200:3-23.
Johansen, Thomas Kjeller 2016. "Parmenides' Likely Story." Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy no. 50:1-29.

Abstract: "This paper reassesses the relationship between the way of Truth and the way of Opinion (doxa) in Parmenides’ poem. Parmenides’ criteria or ‘signs’ of intelligible inquiry are paradigmatically met by

being; however, by fulfilling those criteria, albeit partially and in a different manner from being, the cosmos comes to resemble being and achieve a degree of intelligibility and reality. Being and the cosmos appear in this way to be related as model to likeness. The paper argues on this basis that Parmenides’ cosmology anticipates the likely story of Plato’s Timaeus. Already Proclus in his commentary on the Timaeus had made a similar suggestion, but this paper is the first to attempt to spell out and assess it."
Jones, Barrington. 1973. "Parmenides 'The Way of Truth'." Journal of the History of Philosophy no. 11:287-298.

"Recent years have produced a number of distinct interpretations of Parmenides' philosophical poem. Of these, one of the most interesting is that of Montgomery Furth's "Elements of Eleatic Ontology,"(1) and I shall use his treatment of the poem as the basis for the development of a different interpretation, an interpretation which, hopefully, can preserve the explanatory power of Furth's exposition while avoiding certain of its difficulties.

Furth suggests that, at the start of his argument, Parmenides is concerned to show the meaninglessness of negative "is" statements, whether "is" be taken in an existential or a predicative sense. One cannot say "Unicorns do not exist" meaningfully; for, in order for the word "unicorns" to be meaningful, there must be unicorns for the word to refer to. Therefore, negative existential statements are self-defeating, because they purport to deny a necessary condition of their own meaningfulness. Parallel considerations apply to the predicative sense of "is".

If "John is tall" is meaningful only if John is tall, or the fact of John's being tall exists, or the like, then the statement "John is not tall" would be meaningful only if, for instance, the fact of John's being tall did not exist, but if it did not exist, then, again, there is nothing for the sentence to refer to, and therefore the sentence must be meaningless." (p. 287)

(1) Journal of the History of Philosophy, VI (1968), 111-132.

"To summarize the course of the discussion, then. We have seen that, if we do not take Parmenides as postulating monism, the argument proceeds with considerable force to the conclusions that Parmenides claims, and does so without involving him in any direct fallacy, such as a failure to distinguish between an 'existential' and a 'predicative' sense of "is." For just as I can think of something, so I can think of something's being the case, and the same considerations will apply. Nor does he impose impossibly stringent restrictions on meaningfulness; if anything, he is over-liberal in his admissions of existence and being. Given acceptance of the claim that what can be thought of must be, his argument has force.(26)" (p. 298)

(26) Throughout I have assumed that νόείν is to be taken in its customary sense of "to think." C. H. Kahn ["The Thesis of Parmenides," The Review of Metaphysics, XXII (1969)], (pp. 703-711), however, has maintained that it is to be taken in the stronger sense of "to know." This can hardly be so in view of the fact that Parmenides does ascribe νόος to deluded mankind, who, he claims, are totally enmeshed in δόξα, opinion (B 6.6; 16.2). Furthermore, he uses the expression "wandering νόον," and, had he meant "knowledge," this would be a striking 'contradictio in adiecto' (B 6.6)."
Kahn, Charles H. 1966. "The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the Concept of Being." Foundations of Language no. 2:245-265.

Reprinted in C. H. Kahn, Essays on Being, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 16-40.

"I am concerned in this paper with the philological basis for Greek ontology; that is to say, with the raw material which was provided for philosophical analysis by the ordinary use and meaning of the verb einai, ‘to be'. Roughly stated, my question is: How were the Greek philosophers guided, or influenced, in their formulation of doctrines of Being, by the prephilosophical use of this verb which (together with its nominal derivatives on and ousia) serves to express the concept of Being in Greek?" (p. 16)
———. 1969. "The Thesis of Parmenides." The Review of Metaphysics no. 22:700-724.

Reprinted in C. H. Kahn, Essays on Being, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 143-166.

"If we except Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, Parmenides is perhaps the most important and influential of all the Greek philosophers. And considered as a metaphysician, he is perhaps the most original figure in the western tradition. At any rate, if ontology is the study of Being, or what there is, and metaphysics the study of ultimate Reality, or what there is in the most fundamental way, then Parmenides may reasonably be regarded as the founder of ontology and metaphysics at once. For he is the first to have articulated the concept of Being or Reality as a distinct topic for philosophic discussion.

The poem of Parmenides is the earliest philosophic text which is preserved with sufficient completeness and continuity to permit us to follow a sustained line of argument. It is surely one of the most interesting arguments in the history of philosophy, and we are lucky to have this early text, perhaps a whole century older than the first dialogues of Plato. But the price we must pay for our good fortune is to face up to a vipers' nest of problems, concerning details of the text and the archaic language but also concerning major questions of philosophic interpretation. These problems are so fundamental that, unless we solve them correctly, we cannot even be clear as to what Parmenides is arguing for, or why. And they are so knotted that we can scarcely unravel a single problem without finding the whole nest on our hands.

I am primarily concerned here to elucidate Parmenides' thesis: to see what he meant by the philosophic claim which is compressed into the one-word sentence "it is." I take this to be the premiss (or one of them), from which lie derives his famous denial of all change and plurality. I shall thus consider the nature of this premiss, and why he thought it plausible or self-evident. I shall also look briefly at the structure of his argument which concludes that change is impossible, in order to see a bit more clearly how such a paradoxical conclusion might also seem plausible to Parmenides, and how it could be taken seriously by his successors. Finally, I shall say a word about the Parmenidean identification of Thinking and Being." (pp. 700-701)
———. 1969. "More on Parmenides. A Response to Stein and Mourelatos." The Review of Metaphysics no. 23:333-340.

A Reply to Stein (1969) and Mourelatos (1969).

"For Burnet and for many scholars of his generation, Parmenides was essentially a critic of earlier physical theories and the author of a challenge which provoked the atomist theory of matter as a response. Commentators today are more inclined to see him either as a philosopher of language in the style of Frege or Wittgenstein or, in the Continental tradition, as a metaphysician of Being in the manner of Hegel or Heidegger. It seems to me that Burnet was closer to the truth (even if his interpretation in detail is absurdly narrow) , and that he and Meyerson were faithful to the deeper spirit of Eleatic philosophy in insisting upon a close connection between Parmenides' argument and the physical science of his day and ours. At all events, any interpretation must. take account of the fact that his doctrine seems permanently relevant not only to speculative metaphysics and abstract ontology but also to critical reflection on the structure of natural science.

Hence I am happy that Howard Stein was willing to publish his comments on the poem, since his unusual command of modern physical theory makes it possible for him to formulate a plausible reinterpretation of Eleatic doctrine within the framework of post-Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. I fully agree with him as to the historical and philosophical value of such a reconstruction, even if it cannot square with every facet of the archaic text under discussion. Simply as a commentary on the text, however, a one-sided interpretation fully worked out will often he more illuminating than a carefully balanced synthesis of different points of view.

Once such an interpretation has been presented, it is the ungrateful task of the interlocutor to insist upon the appropriate qualifications. Stein's reconstruction gains in coherence by taking Parmenides' Being as "truth" rather than "thing," as "discernible structure in the world" or alles, was der Fall ist: the unique Sachverhalt but not the unique Gegenstand. But Parmenides himself is not so coherent, and part of the creative influence of his theory was due precisely to the fact that it can also he understood-and was presumably also intended-as an account of the only thing or entity or object that can be rationally understood. Hence it was that, the atomists could define the concept of indestructible solid body as their new version of Being (on), and empty space as the new form of Non-being (ouk on or oudén). In general, the Greek philosophers never succeeded in formulating a systematic distinction between thing and fact, between individual object and structure (although Plato's self-criticism and later development of the theory of Forms may involve a conscious shift, from one category to the, other)." (pp. 333-334)

"I am grateful to Alexander Mourelatos for having tried to formulate my interpretation more precisely, and if he has not entirely succeeded that no doubt. shows that my own exposition was not clear enough. I confess that. 1 do not recognize my view in the complicated reduction sentences which he offers as a semi-formalization of my version of thesis and antithesis in fragment 2. I agree with him that any reading of the first and second Ways must construe them as contradictory, so that "the reason which compels rejection of the second route is the reason which enjoins strict and faithful adherence to the first route" (p. 736). I think my view can he shown to satisfy this condition, and to this end I shall indulge in a hit of rudimentary formalization." (p. 335)
———. 1970. "Die Offenbarung des Parmenides und die menschliche Welt by Jaap Mansfeld (Review)." Gnomon:113-119.

Review of Jaap Mansfeld, Die Offenbarung des Parmenides und die menschliche Welt, Assen: Van Gorcum 1964.

"Mansfeld has given us one of the most penetrating and original discussions of Parmenides' poem since Frankel's Parmenidesstudien in 1930. The book consists of four chapters, each one of which might stand alone as an independent essay, but which together aim at a unified view of Parmenides' thought. Mansfeld develops his interpretation with a wealth of detail, a careful, nearly complete, and on the whole judicious discussion of other views, which makes his book at once a commentary on the poem and a valuable survey of earlier scholarship." (p. 113)

"Thus Maansfeld does justice to the positive side of the Doxa, in the analogies with Being, and also to the negative side, in the original sin of positing two forms instead of rejecting the other as the non-existent. He goes farther than other interpreters in suggesting an epistemic or pedagogic function of the Doxa as a theory which permits the initiate (i. e. the philosopher) to find his way back to the origins of the manifold of experience in the positing of two basic forms." (p. 118)
———. 1973. The Verb 'Be' in ancient Greek. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Volume 6 of: John W. M. Verhhar (ed.), The Verb 'Be' and its Synonims: Philosophical and Grammatical Studies, Dordrecht: Reidel.

Reprinted by Hackett Publishing, 2003 with new introduction and discussion of relation between predicative and existential uses of the verb einai.

"First of all, a word of clarification on the nature of the enterprise. My original aim was to provide a kind of grammatical prolegomenon to Greek ontology. First of all, a word of clarification on the nature of the enterprise. My original aim was to provide a kind of grammatical prolegomenon to Greek ontology.

The notion of Being, as formulated by Parmenides, seems to come from nowhere, like a philosophical meteor with no historical antecedents but profound historical consequences. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this new conception. On the one hand, Plato's doctrine of the eternal being of the Forms as well as his struggle with Not-Being both clearly derive from Parmenides' account of to on. On the other hand, not only Aristotle's doctrine of categories as "the many ways that things are said to be" but also his definition of metaphysics as the study of "being qua being" provide deliberate alternatives to Parmenides' monolithic conception of what is." (Introduction (2003), p. VII)
———. 1988. "Being in Parmenides and Plato." La Parola del passato no. 43:237-261.

Reprinted in C. H. Kahn, Essays on Being, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 167-191.

"Despite the silence of Aristotle, there can be little doubt of the importance of Parmenides as an influence on Plato's thought. If it was the encounter with Socrates that made Plato a philosopher, it was the poem of Parmenides that made him a metaphysician. In the first place it was Parmenides' distinction between Being and Becoming that provided Plato with the ontological basis for his theory of Forms. When he decided to submit this theory to searching criticism, he chose as critic no other than Parmenides himself. And when the time came for Socrates to be replaced as principal speaker in the dialogues, Plato introduced as his new spokesman a visitor from Elea. Even in the Timaeus, where the chief speaker is neither Socrates nor the Eleatic Stranger, the exposition takes as its starting-point the Parmenidean dichotomy. (1) From the Symposium and Phaedo to the Sophist and Timaeus, the language of Platonic metaphysics is largely the language of Parmenides.

One imagines that Plato had studied the poem of Parmenides with considerable care. He had the advantage of a complete text, an immediate knowledge of the language, and perhaps even an Eleatic tradition of oral commentary. So he was in a better position than we are to understand what Parmenides had in mind. Since Plato has given us a much fuller and more explicit statement of his own conception of Being, this conception, if used with care, may help us interpret the more lapidary and puzzling utterances of Parmenides himself."

(1) Timaeus 27D 5: 'The first distinction to be made is this: what is the Being that is forever and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming but never being?'. (p. 237)
———. 2002. "Parmenides and Plato." In Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Alexander Mourelatos, edited by Caston, Victor and Graham, Daniel W., 81-94. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Reprinted in C. H. Kahn, Essays on Being, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 192-206.

"This seems a happy occasion to return to Parmenides, in order both to clarify my own interpretation of Parmenidean Being and also to emphasize the affinity between what I have called the veridical reading and the account in terms of predication that Alex Mourelatos gave in his monumental The Route of Parmenides.) It is good to have this opportunity to acknowledge how much our views have in common, even if they do not coincide. And perhaps I may indulge here in a moment of nostalgia, since Alex and I are both old Parmenideans. My article 'The Thesis of Parmenides' was published in 1969, just a year before Alex's book appeared. That was nearly thirty years ago, and it was not the beginning of the story for either of us. My own Eleatic obsession had taken hold even earlier, with an unpublished Master's dissertation on Parmenides, just as Alex had begun with a doctoral dissertation on the same subject. So, for both of us, returning to Parmenides may have some of the charm of returning to the days of our youth." (p. 81)

"I want to defend Parmenides' positive account of Being as a coherent, unified vision.

And I think his refutation of coming-to-be if formally impeccable, once one accepts the premise (which Plato will deny) that esti and ouk esti are mutually exclusive, like p and not-p. And it is precisely this assimilation of the 'is or is-not' dichotomy to the law of non-contradiction -- to p or not-p' - that accounts for the extraordinary effectiveness of Parmenides' argument, its acceptance by the fifth-century cosmologists, and the difficulty that Plato encountered in answering it.

However, if the rich, positive account of Being that results from Parmenides' amalgamation of the entire range of uses and meanings of einai turns out to be a long-term success (as the fruitful ancestor of ancient atomism, Platonic Forms, and the metaphysics of eternal Being in western theology), the corresponding negation in Not-Being is a conceptual nightmare. Depending on which function of einai is being denied, to mê on can represent either negative predication, falsehood, non-identity, non-existence, or non-entity, that is to say, nothing at all. The fallacy in Parmenides' argument lies not in the cumulation of positive attributes for Being but in the confused union of these various modes of negation in the single conception of 'what-is-not.' That is why Plato saw fit to criticize his great predecessor in respect to the notion of Not-Being, while making positive use of the Parmenidean notion of Being." (pp. 89-90)
———. 2005. "Parmenides and Being." In Frühgriechisches Denken, edited by Rechenauer, Georg, 217-226. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
———. 2007. "Some disputed questions in the interpretation of Parmenides." Anais de Filosofia Clássica no. 1:33-45.

"It is always a pleasure to have an opportunity to return to Parmenides, a philosopher I fell in love with when I was a graduate student. Over the years I have published more than once on Parmenides' conception of Being and its impact on Plato. So my views on this subject are well known, and I shall not repeat them here. But I will at least refer to Parmenides' concept of Being, and I would be happy to discuss this in the question period.

But I want to start by situating Parmenides in relation to the tradition of natural philosophy that begins in Miletus, and I will then proceed to discuss a few disputed points, first concerning the interpretation of crucial passages and finally concerning the direction of the chariot ride in the proem." (p. 33)
———. 2009. "Postscript on Parmenides." In Essays on Being, 207-217. New York: Oxford University Press.

Postscript on Parmenides (2008): 1. Parmenides and physics; 2. The direction of the chariot ride in the proem; 3. The epistemic preference for Fire.

"Parmenides was my first love in philosophy. I had once thought to write a book on Parmenides, but there always seemed to be too many unsolved problems. I conclude these essays by returning to three problems that do seem soluble, and that do not involve the concept of Being: Parmenides' relation to natural philosophy, the direction of the chariot ride in his proem, and the epistemic preference for Fire." (p. 207)
Kember, Owen. 1971. "Right and Left in the Sexual Theories of Parmenides." The Journal of Hellenic Studies no. 91:92-106.

Abstract: "G. E. R. Lloyd (1) has argued that Parmenides 'probably held that the sex of the child is determined by its place on the right or left of the mother's womb (right for males, left for females)'. It is the purpose of this paper to challenge this assertion by re-examining the primary evidence of fragments 17 and r8 of Parmenides as well as the tangled mass of testimony of the doxographers, Censorinus, Aetius and Lactantius. In so doing I shall consciously observe a sharp distinction between theories of sex differentiation and theories

of heredity since I shall argue that the confusion of the two subjects has led to distortion of Parmenides' doctrines."

(1) G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy (Cambridge, 1966) 17 and 50. It is interesting to note the change in wording from Lloyd's article in JHS lxxxii (1962) 60 where he uses the word 'apparently' instead of 'probably'. Other discussions on the problem of Parmenides' sexual theories within the last ten years include that of W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, vol. ii (Cambridge, 1965) 78 ff. and L. Tarán, Parmenides (Princeton, 1965) 263-6.

Tarán indeed asserts (264, note 98) 'sex, according to Parmenides, was determined by the female and not by the male'. Earlier work of importance in this field has been done by E. Lesky, "Die Zeugungs- und Vererbungslehren der Antike und ihr Nachwirken", Akademie

der Wissenscheften und der Literatur, Mainz, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Jahrgang 1950, Nr. 19, 1272 ff.
Kerferd, George. 1991. "Aristotle's Treatment of the Doctrine of Parmenides." In Aristotle and the Later Tradition, edited by Blumenthal, Henry and Robinson, Howard, 1-7. New York: Oxford University Press.

"In his De caelo (3. 1, 298bi4~24 = 28 A 25 DK) Aristotle makes a strange and puzzling statement about Parmenides and the Eleatics." [follow the translation of the passage] (p. 1)

(...)

"What I want rather to do is to suggest a way in which we can make sense both of Aristotle’s remark in the De caelo and of Simplicius’ comments.

This can be done, I would argue, in the following way. Let us begin by assuming that all we have is the world of seeming. This, however, is seen to be defective in that it combines ‘is’ and ‘is not’, and we can know on the basis of the logical insight developed with devastating effect by Parmenides that only that which is can exist. We must accordingly proceed to a fresh analysis of the world of seeming. If we take this world at its own level, which is that of seeming, we can see that it contains, and so can be analysed into, combinations that change between two shapes or principles, light and darkness (Parmenides 28 B 8. 41, 53-9 DK). Thus, any physical object can be found both in the daytime and at night, and further it can be seen at any one time as combining what we might call reflectivity and light-absorption. We have thus the first step in a reductionist analysis. These two principles, however, can next be reduced to one—darkness is what is not light, and on the principles of Parmenidean logic what is not cannot exist. We need not ask whether the negative in ‘is not light’ is negating a copula or negating an existential sense of the verb ‘to be’—in either case it is plausible enough to treat darkness as a negative principle. We are left then with the one principle only, that which is. This principle can be regarded as something which is itself inside or within the world of seeming. But it will be better understood, I would suggest, as being not within the world of seeming but rather in a sense the world of seeming as such when this world is correctly understood and is stripped by the application of Parmenidean logic and cleansed of the plurality of names which mortals assign to it. For Simplicius this whole approach is to be seen as a mistake because it involves a denial of the dualism essential to Platonism, the dualism between the intelligible world and the (derived) world of appearances. But it may well have seemed to him to be a mistake which Parmenides was actually making." (pp. 6-7)
Ketchum, Richard. 1990. "Parmenides on What There Is." Canadian Journal of Philosophy no. 20:167-190.

Abstract: "There is an interpretation of Parmenides' poem which has not yet had, but deserves, a hearing. It reconciles two of the most prominent views of the meaning of the verb 'to be' ('εἶναι') as it occurs in the poem. It agrees with the spirit of those who interpret 'εἶναι' as 'existence.' It agrees with the letter of those who interpret 'εἶναι' as the copula. The basic idea is to treat relevant syntactically incomplete occurrences of the verb 'to be' as meaning 'to be something or other.(1) In section I, I will explain and clarify the interpretation. In section II, I will dialectically support the interpretation by comparing it with other major interpretations.

Weaknesses will also appear." (p. 167)

(1) To my knowledge the idea that such uses of the verb εἶναι' in Greek philosophy might be profitably interpreted in this way was introduced by G.E.L. Owen ('A Metaphysical Paradox' in Rendord Bambrough, ed., New Essays On Plato and Aristotle New York: Humanities Press 1965 71, n. 1). He originally suggested that for Plato to be is to be something or other but later ('Plato on Not-Being') in Gregory Vlastos, ed., Plato, I Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1971 266) he recants.

As for the equation "to be is to be something," the negation of "to be something" is "not to be anything" or "to be nothing," which Plato holds to be unintelligible; and then it would follow from the equation that "not to be" makes no sense. But Plato recognizes no use of the verb in which it cannot be directly negated.

The fact that Parmenides not only recognizes but demands a use of the verb 'to be' which cannot be meaningfully negated is a reason to attempt to understand his use of 'to be' as 'to be something other.'

As is well known, Owen himself interprets Parmenides' syntactically incomplete uses of 'eivai' as 'to exist?' ('Eleatic Questions',) Classical Quarterly 10 1960, 94).
———. 1993. "A Note on Barnes' Parmenides." Phronesis.A Journal for Ancient Philosophy no. 38:95-97.

"In The Presocratic Philosophers Vol. I: Thales to Zeno (London, 1979, pp. 155-175) Jonathan Barnes presents a formalization of an argument he finds in Fragments B2, B3 and B6 (148, 149 and 150 in Barnes' numbering). I am sympathetic to the enterprise but I think the execution is confused. After explaining the confusion, I present an alternative which I think preserves most of Barnes' interpretation." (p. 95)
Kimhi, Irad. 2018. Thinking and Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

"This book proceeds from the conviction that philosophical logic can make progress only by working through certain puzzles—such as those that come into view only once one is struck by that which is most puzzling in the pronouncements of the goddess who stands at the outset, the gate, of Parmenides’s poem.

It has become difficult, in our time, to be struck by that which is most puzzling in these pronouncements. For we are apt to think that we have already put the difficulty behind us. Our misplaced confidence stems from our present conceptions of logic and language. We fail to see that, for all of their technical and mathematical sophistication, these conceptions are inadequate to the task of philosophical logic indicated above." (p. 2)
Kingaley, K. Scarlett. 2024. Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 6: Historical Inquiry and Presocratic Epistemology, pp. 167-189.

"Nearly all subsequent Presocratic philosophers commented on truth and the difficulty of attaining it. Alcmaeon’s philosophical treatise began with the admonition that the gods alone had “certainty,” σαφήνειαν, while mortals “inferred from signs,” τεκμαίρεσθαι (DK 24 B 1). Heraclitus yields some evidence for a pessimistic view of man’s ability to identify truth with the forensic metaphor that “men are poor defendants of the true” (ἄνθρωποι κακοὶ ἀληθινῶν ἀντίδικοι).(18) But it is Parmenides’ On Nature, contemporaneous with Heraclitus’ work, that is the most comprehensive meditation on second-order concerns about truth, falsehood, and seeming. In the nearly 150 lines of the hexameter poem that survive, a philosophical treatise unfolds in the form of a meeting of two individuals, an unnamed Youth, who begins the narration, and a female divinity, whose two-part discourse constitutes nearly all of the fragments we possess." (pp. 171-172, a note omitted)

(...)

"A key innovation in the discussion of truth is Parmenides’ elevation of the participle of the verb “to be,” eon, “what-is,” as an avenue for epistemological discussion. The first part of the goddess’ revelation in the treatise is fixed squarely on eon. Its meaning as either an absolute “what-is” or a complement in the sense of “what is x” continues to inspire fierce debate in modern scholarship.(52) The goddess explicitly rejects the consideration of τό γε μὴ ἐόν (B2.7); she avers that τὸ ἐόν cannot be cut from holding onto τὸ ἐόν (B 4); what-is (ἐόν) is ungenerated, indestructible, complete, singleborn, stable, without end (B 8). This discussion as a whole constitutes “thought about truth” (B8.50-1: νόημα | ἀμφὶς ἀληθείης), as opposed to opinion." (p. 181, a note omitted)

(18) DK 22 B 133. For a discussion of the epistemological vocabulary used by Heraclitus, see Lesher (1983), passim.

(52) Gallop (1984), 42.

References

Gallop, D. (1984), Parmenides of Elea: Fragments: A Text and Translation with an Introduction (Phoenix Supplementary no. 147) (Toronto, University of Toronto Press).

Lesher, J. H. (1984), “Parmenides’ critique of thinking: The Poludêris Elenchos of Fragment ,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2: 1-30.
Kingsley, Peter. 1999. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness: Golden Sufi Center.

"What is to be done when the scholarly author of a book is also a believer and writes in a style that seeks to convert the reader in two different senses of that word?

Firstly, to convert the academic reader to the argument expressed, and secondly to convert the reader more generally to the belief system expressed in the book – in this case a wider mystical approach to life. Whilst doing this, Kingsley also suggests that the current point-of-view of the scholar may be nothing more than a dogmatic and faith-tinged position anyway – so how should we read all this? These questions should be at the forefront of any reader’s response to In the Dark Places of Wisdom.

Kingsley is a lauded academic and also a self-admitted mystic and this book is framed as a journey into a new take on reality." p. 118 (Christopher Hartney, Book Review of Peter Kingsley: In the Dark Places of Wisdom, "Alternative Spirituality and Religion=, 9, 2018, pp. 118-121)

"And that’s the purpose of this book: to awaken something we’ve forgotten, something we’ve been made to forget by the passing of time and by those who’ve misunderstood or—for reasons of their own—have wanted us to forget.

It could be said that this process of awakening is profoundly healing. It is. The only trouble with saying this is that we’ve come to have such a superficial idea of healing. For most of us, healing is what makes us comfortable and eases the pain. It’s what softens, protects us. And yet what we want to be healed of is often what will heal us if we can stand the discomfort and the pain." (p. 4)

"You might be tempted to describe the way that Parmeneides and the people close to him have been treated in the last two thousand years as a conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence. And in a very basic sense you’d be right.

But at the same time all these dramas of misrepresentation, of misuse and abuse, are nothing compared with what’s been done to the central part of his teachings- or the writings of his successors. And the dramas fade away almost into insignificance compared with the extraordinary power of those teachings as they still survive: a power that’s waiting to be understood again and used, not just talked about or pushed aside. This is what we ll need to explore next, and start rediscovering step by step.

So everything that’s been mentioned so far Parmeneides’ opening account of his journey to another world, the traditions about him, the finds at Velia—may seem a story in itself or even a story within a story. But the story is far from finished, and this book that you’ve come to the end of is only the beginning: the first chapter." (p. 231)
———. 2003. Reality. Inverness: Golden Sufi Center.

"The writings of Parmenides, and other people like him, survive in fragments. Scholars have played all sorts of games with them. For centuries they have experimented with distorting them and torturing them until they seem to yield a sense exactly the opposite of their original meaning. Then they argue about their significance and put them on show like exhibits in a museum.

And no one understands quite how important they are. Even though they only survive in bits and pieces, they are far less fragmentary than we are. And they are much more than dead words. They are like the mythological treasure—the invaluable object that has been lost and misused and has to be rediscovered at all costs.

But this is not mythology, or fiction. It’s reality. Fiction is like sitting on a goldmine and dreaming about gold; it’s everything that happens when you forget this.

There is absolutely nothing mystical in what I am saying. It's very simple, completely down-to-earth and practical. We tend to imagine we have our feet on the ground when we are dealing with facts. And yet facts are of absolutely no significance in themselves: it’s just as easy to get lost in facts as it is to get lost in fictions.

They have their value, and we have to use them—but use them to go beyond them. Facts on their own are like sitting on top of a goldmine and scratching at the dust around our feet with a little stick." (p. 21)
Kirk, Geoffrey S., Raven, John E., and Schofield, Malcolm. 1983. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Second revised edition; first edition (by Kirk and Raven) 1957.

Chapter VIII - Parmenides of Elea, pp. 239-262.

"Parmenides is credited with a single 'treatise' (Diog. L. 1, 16, DK 28a 13). Substantial fragments of this work, a hexameter poem, survive, thanks largely to Sextus Empiricus (who preserved the proem) and Simplicius (who transcribed further extracts into his commentaries on Aristotle’s de caelo and Physics ‘because of the scarceness of the treatise’). Ancients and moderns alike are agreed upon a low estimation of Parmenides’ gifts as a writer. He has little facility in diction, and the struggle to force novel, difficult and highly abstract philosophical ideas into metrical form frequently results in ineradicable obscurity, especially syntactic obscurity. On the other hand, in the less argumentative passages of the poem he achieves a kind of clumsy grandeur.

After the proem, the poem falls into two parts. The first expounds ‘the tremorless heart of well-rounded Truth’ (288, 29). Its argument is radical and powerful. Parmenides claims that in any enquiry there are two and only two logically coherent possibilities, which are exclusive — that the subject of the enquiry exists or that it does not exist. On epistemological grounds he rules out the second alternative as unintelligible. He then turns to abuse of ordinary mortals for showing by their beliefs that they never make the choice between the two ways ‘is’ and ‘is not’, but follow both without discrimination. In the final section of this first part he explores the one secure path, ‘is’, and proves in an astonishing deductive tour de force that if something exists, it cannot come to be or perish, change or move, nor be subject to any imperfection. Parmenides’ arguments and his paradoxical conclusions had an enormous influence on later Greek philosophy; his method and his impact alike have rightly been compared to those of Descartes’ cogito." (p. 241)
Kirk, Geoffrey S. , and Stokes, Michael C. 1960. "Parmenides' refutation of motion." Phronesis no. 5:1-4.

"Since Burnet at least (Early Greek Philosophy [third edition], 1920) pp. 179 and 181) it has been common to attribute to Parmenides the argument against motion described by Melissus in his fragment 7.

(...)

It had occurred independently to the authors of this short paper that the matter deserved further clarification, and, having discovered in conversation that their views were closely similar, they submit them jointly." (p. 1)

"Thus the fragments of Parmenides contain not the slightest hint of the physical argument that motion is impossible because it entails the existence of a void to move in. But this physical argument is stated in Melissus fr. 7 § 7, after the assertion that void, as not-being, does not exist: 'Nor does it [sc. Being] move; for it has nowhere to withdraw to, but is full. For if there had been void, it would have withdrawn into the void; but since there is no void it does not have anywhere to withdraw to'. If it had not been for Plato Theaetetus 180 E 3-4, the attribution of this kind of argument to Parmenides, not merely to Melissus, would presumably never have been made." (p. 2)

"This whole field of possibilities deserves further exploration, but is shut off by the unjustified interpretation of those who attribute to Parmenides an argument invented probably by Melissus." (p. 4)
Klibansky, Raymond. 1943. "The Rock of Parmenides. Mediaeval Accounts of the Origins of Dialectic." Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies no. 1:171-186.
Knight, Thomas S. 1959. "Parmenides and the Void." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:524-528.

"Unless Parmenides' One Being is considered a corporeal unit, he cannot be said to have denied the existence of a void. And whether or not his monism can be regarded as materialistic is a matter of dispute." (p. 524)

"Descartes rejected the proposition that there can be a space in which there is no body only after he had demonstrated "The grounds on which the existence of material things may be known with certainty."(10) The Pythagoreans, after viewing their numbers as discontinuous, postulated a void to separate them."(11) Void appears then to be posterior to: some kind of phenomenalism, some kind of materialism, and some kind of pluralism.

The point here is that Parmenides' One Being excludes all of these.

It seems, therefore, purely arbitrary to say that Parmenides denied the existence of void. The only way to answer Parmenides is to find some reasonable relation between Being and non-Being. Taking body as "what is" and void as "what is not" merely rejects the more original and more fundamental problem, How can non-Being be?" (pp. 527-528)
Kočandrle, Radim. 2018. "Explaining Earth’s Stability by Uniformity: Origins of the Argument." Apeiron.A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science no. 51:459-482.

Abstract: "Aristotle ascribes to Anaximander a conception according to which the Earth remains in its place due to uniformity. Plato shows that this argument’s validity is based on both the Earth and the universe being spherical. Anaximander, however, believed the Earth to be flat. Since Aetius ascribes the abovementioned reasoning also to Parmenides, in whose work we find hits to spherical shapes, the argument might be based on Parmenides’ thoughts."
Kohlschitter, Silke. 1991. "Parmenides and Empedocles in Porphyry's History of Philosophy." Hermatena no. 150:43-53.

"In a kind of history of philosophy Shahrastani(1) draws up a list of seven philosophers(2) - Empedocles among them - whom he calls the "pillars of wisdom".(3) He approaches them with an unambiguous concern regarding the creator, namely to show his unity, and clearly formulated questions with regard to the creation of the world, namely "what and how many the primary principles are, and what the έσκατα are and when they come to happen".(4) As Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiehl convincingly show, Shahrastani took over the canon of the seven philosophers, as well as the problems he brings to them, from Porphyry.(5) The work that is to be considered in this context is his ¨φίλοσοφος ιστορία, of which fragments are preserved.(6)"

(...)

"Parmenides is the thinker who exclusively argues on the basis of the conditions of thinking itself." (p. 43)

"The central term in the Parmenidean philosophy of history is Dike.

All, by being unchangeable and motionless only as a whole, is actually unified and held together by her. One must therefore conceive of Dike as the supreme deity in Parmenides. Here the question arises, in what relationship to each other she and history, or rather eternal being and the world of seeming have to be seen." (p. 44)

(1) Muhammad B. 'Abd al-Karim Shahrastani was the principal historian in the oriental Middle Ages (1076-1153). The work that is relevant for the present paper is his Kitab al-Mital wa'I-Nihal, a treatise on religions and sects.

(2) Thales, Anaxagoras ( = Anaximander), Anaximenes, Empedocles, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato.

(3) Shahrastani; 253, 13.

(4) F. Altheim and R. Stiehl, Porphyrios und Empedokles, Tübingen, 1954, p. 9.

(5) Cf. Altheim/Stiehl, pp. 8-19.

(6) See Porphyrii philosophi Platonici opuscula tria, recog. A. Nauck, Lipsiae 1860.

Shahrastani, Kitab al-Mital wan Nihal, ed. Cureton, London 1846, transl. by Haarbriicker, Halle 1850-51 (=Shahrastani). [See also the French translation: Livre des religions et des sectes, translated by Daniel Gimaret, Guy Monnot, Jean Jolivet, Louvain, Peeters, 1986-1993 (two volumes)]
Korab-Karpowicz, W. Julian. 2017. The Presocratics in the Thought of Martin Heidegger. Bern: Peter Lang.

Contents: Preface 11; Abbreviations 13; Introduction 15; Chapter One: Philosophy, History and the Presocratics 23; Chapter Two: The Anaximander Fragment 63; Chapter Three: Heraclitus: Physis and the Logos 109; Chapter Four: Being and Thinking in Parmenides 119; Chapter Five: The Presocratics and the History of Being 219; Bibliography 247.

"Chapter Four is a consideration of Parmenides' fragments 1, 2, 3, 6 and 8 in Heidegger's interpretation, which comes from different works of the middle and later period of his thought. Since for Heidegger all primordial thinkers speak essentially the same, in his reading of Parmenides, I encounter the same issues with which we are already familiar from earlier chapters. He does not set up any opposition between Heraclitus and Parmenides.

Nevertheless, if in the study of Heraclitus his focus was on λόγος, and φύσις, now the foremost attention is given to Αλήθεια. In Heidegger's view, ἀλήθεια is a basic character of beings, as well as the horizon within which the manifestation of what is present occurs. He claims that in the tradition of Western philosophy, the original Greek experience of ἀλήθεια has been misinterpreted and forced into oblivion. Consequently, for Heidegger, ἀλήθεια is what is most worthy of thought. Its question is, for him, inseparably bound up with the question of being. Heidegger's inquiry into ἀλήθεια in the Parmenidean poem takes us beyond the Greek experience of being, namely, to ἀλήθεια in the no longer Greek but Heideggerian sense as the openness of being. Further, since the openness of being refers to a situation with in history, the context of his interpretation of Parmenides becomes the history of being. Only in this context, I conclude, can we fully understand and appreciate the interpretation of Presocratic thinkers in his later works." (p. 21)
Kraus, Manfred. 2019. "William of Moerbeke' translation of Simplicius On de caelo and the costitution of the text of Parmenides." In ὁδοὶ νοῆσαι. Ways to Think. Essays in Honour of Néstor-Luis Cordero, edited by Pulpito, Massimo and Spangenberg, Pilar, 213-230. Bologna: Diogene Multimedia.

Abstract: "Although Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle’s treatise De caelo is one of the most valuable sources, in a number of cases even our only source, for the transmission of particular fragments of Parmenides, compared to the commentary on the Physics it has for specific reasons been sorely neglected in the past. When in 1894 J. L. Heiberg edited the text of this commentary, he ound its Latin translation by William of Moerbeke (1271) to be a highly valuable secondary textual witness despite its coarse and inelegant style. However, while Heiberg only knew this translation from a faulty 16th-century printing, we are now in possession of reliable critical editions of the books most relevant for the Parmenides text. Recent studies have further yielded that the Greek manuscript of In De Caelo Moerbeke translated from was definitely superior to all manuscripts extant today. All the more, this not only make possible, but also advises an employment of Moerbeke’s translation for the purposes of textual criticism. This essay gives a brief survey of the complex editorial history of both Simplicius’ commentary and Moerbeke’s translation as well of the current status of their texts. It undertakes a close comparative reading of Moerbeke’s renderings of the seven direct quotations of passages Irom Parmenides exhibited in In De Caelo. It will be shown that by taking recourse to this valuable tool fundamental textual decisions can be confirmed, supported or challenged in a number of crucial passages."
Kreitner, L. B. 1968. "A Greek arch and Parmenides' head. A report on Velia-Elea." History To-day no. 18:129-131.
Kurfess, Christopher. 2012. Restoring Parmenides' Poem: Essays toward a New Arrangement of the Fragments Based on a Reassessment of the Original Sources, University of Pittsburgh.

Unpublished Ph. D. thesis available at https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/16704/

Abstract: "The history of philosophy proper, claimed Hegel, began with the poem of the Presocratic Greek philosopher Parmenides. Today, that poem is extant only in fragmentary form, the various fragments surviving as quotations, translations, or paraphrases in the works of better-preserved authors of antiquity. These range from Plato, writing within a century after Parmenides' death, to the sixth-century C.E. commentator Simplicius of Cilicia, the latest figure known to have had access to the compete poem. Since the Renaissance, students of Parmenides have relied on collections of fragments compiled by classical scholars, and since the turn of the twentieth century, Hermann Diels' Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, through a number of editions, has remained the standard collection for Presocratic material generally and for the arrangement of Parmenides' fragments in particular.

This dissertation is an extended critique of that arrangement. I argue that the reconstructions of Parmenides' poem in the last two centuries suffer from a number of mistakes. Those errors stem from a general failure to appreciate the peculiar literary character of his work as well as the mishandling, in particular instances, of the various sources that preserve what remains of his verse. By reconsidering a number of rarely questioned assumptions underlying the standard presentations and by revisiting the source material with greater care, a number of scholarly impasses that have beset the discussion of this difficult text are resolved, and the foundations for a more faithful and fuller reconstruction of Parmenides' work are established."
———. 2014. "Verity’s Intrepid Heart: The Variants in Parmenides, DK B 1.29 (and 8.4)." Apeiron.A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science no. 47:81-93.

Abstract: "Abstract: This paper argues that the widespread impression of Parmenides as a poor poet has led to consequential errors in the reconstruction of his poem. A reconsideration of the sources behind two of the more disputed lines in the standard arrangement of the fragments leads to the suggestion that modern editors have mistakenly treated what were similar but separate lines in the original poem as variants of a single verse. Seeing through that confusion allows us to see Parmenides in a better poetic light, and gives potential insight into how his manner of exposition relates to his philosophic message."
———. 2016. "The truth about Parmenides’ « Doxa »." Ancient Philosophy:13-45.

"In a recent article in this journal, Néstor-Luis Cordero has offered an interesting account of how scholars may have been misreading Parmenides' poem for centuries, as well as some provocative suggestions on how to correct that misreading.(1)

(...)

Cordero’s essay is a valuable reminder that the arrangements of the fragments that we encounter today are reconstructions by modern editors, a fact too easily and too frequently overlooked. However, his account of the history of scholarship on the Doxa calls for correction on some points, and his own proposed rearrangement of the fragments strikes me as at least as chimerical a production as the more familiar presentation that Cordero likens to the fantastic creatures of Greek myth. Thus, while I share with him a conviction that the orthodoxy about the Doxa is incorrect, my own view of where it goes wrong is rather different. In what follows, I begin by discussing several matters raised by Cordero that, though often neglected, are necessary preliminaries for a responsible reconstruction

of Parmenides' poem. As we proceed, attending more closely to the ancient sources for the fragments and venturing into what might seem like alien terrain, a different way of viewing the Doxa, including a ‘new' fragment, will emerge."

(1) ‘The “Doxa of Parmenides” Dismantled', hereafter ‘Cordero 2010'. See also Cordero 2008, [Eleatica 2006: Parmenide scienziato? Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag] 78-80 and Cordero 2011b [Parmenidean “Physics” is not Part of what Parmenides calls “δόξα”]. References to Cordero 2010 in the main body of the text are by page number(s) alone, given in parentheses. The abbreviation ‘DK' refers to Diels and Kranz 1951. Items such as ‘DK 10' or ‘DK 7.5' are shorthand for referring to the ‘B' fragments (and line numbers, if given) in the chapter in DK on Parmenides.
———. 2018. "An Overlooked Fragment of Parmenides in Proclus?" Apeiron.A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science no. 51:245-257.

Abstract: "I propose that a quotation appearing in Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, and attributed by Proclus to Parmenides, preserves an independent fragment of Parmenides’ poem. Because the verses quoted share language familiar from other Parmenidean and Empedoclean lines, scholars have regarded Proclus’ quotation as a conflation of lines by Parmenides and Empedocles, but when due allowance is made for the repetitiousness of Parmenides’ poetry and for Empedocles’ borrowings from Parmenides, there is no reason to assume any confusion on Proclus’ part."
La Croce, Ernesto. 1980-1981. "Empedocles' sphairos and Parmenidean legacy." Platon no. 31-32:114-122.
Laks, André. 1990. "'The More' and 'The Full': on the reconstruction of Parmenides' theory of sensation in Theophrastus' De sensibus, 3-4." Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy:1-18.

Already published in French as: "Parménide dans Théophraste", in "La Parola del passato. Rivista di studi antichi", 43, 1988, pp. 262-280.

"Under the aegis of this physicist, and pre-Empedoclean, Parmenides of the second part of the poem, I propose to analyse here the context of the quotation of fr. 16 DK in Theophrastus' Treatise on Sensations.(9) My aim is to show how Theophrastus, by the use which he makes of the term συμμετρία in his critical summary of Parmenides' theory of sensations, would have authorized the doxographical tradition (of which he is one of the primary sources) to rank Parmenides, no less than Empedocles and Epicurus, under the banner of a physics which respected the integrity of being, that is, in the terms of Aetius' report, of a physics of quantity and of aggregates. This demonstration analyses the way in which Theophrastus interprets fr. 16 and rereads closely the first part of Theophrastus' report, which presents itself in part as its exegesis." (p. 3-4)

(9) J. P. Hershbell, 'Parmenides' Way of Truth and B 16', Apeiron, 4 (1970), 1-23, has suggested that the fragment ought rather to belong to the first part of the poem; but it is hard to see how, if it is true that the duality of the elements, which the fragment certainly presupposes (cf. the beginning of Theophrastus' report: δυοίν οντοιν στοιχείοιν) has no place there.
———. 2013. "Phenomenon and Reference: Revisiting Parmenides, Empedocles, and the Problem of Rationalization." In Modernity's Classics, edited by Humphreys, Sarah C. and Wagner, Rudolf G., 165-186. Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.

Summary: "This paper deals with the state of affairs arising when philosophy, which already had many of the characteristics of a modern discipline, became subject in the modern period to historicism (raising questions about its ‘origins’) and to new conceptions of rationality and the irrational. The term ‘rationalization’, used for describing some kind of process leading from an ‘irrational’ to a ‘rational’ state of affairs, takes two opposed values, depending on whether this process is considered as objective or subjective, legitimate or not. The development of a new form of rationality in Archaic Greece (philosophy) and its later historiography often display interesting tensions between the two options. Have we to deal with the ‘original’ phenomenon, which should not be explained away, or with transpositions, which ‘refer’ to traditional claims or patterns of thought? The article confronts in this respect Parmenides’ fantastic description of his journey to the Goddess, in the proem of his poem, and Empedocles’ self-portrait as a sorcerer andmagician, in some of his fragments, and suggests that both of them are liable to the second approach.(1)"

(1) Revised version (responding to observations and requests for clarification from S. Humphreys) of Laks 2003; bibliography updated.

Many thanks to her for the translation and for the further suggestions she made while doing it. R. Wagner, whom I also thank for his reading, tells me that there are Sinological parallels to the role of shamanism in the interpretations of Greek philosophy analysed here,

for example in comments on the voyage of Qu Yuan in the Chu ci (see Hawkes 1985), or in the “mystical” conception of Chinese thought current in the Tel Quel group (cf. Saussy 2002, Chap. 8).

References

Hawkes, David. 1985. Ch’u tz’u. The Songs of the South: an Ancient Chinese Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Laks, Andr. 2003. “Phénomènes et références: éléments pour une réflexion sur la rationalisation de l’irrationel.” Methodos 3: 9–33.

Saussy, Haun. 2002. Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latona, Max J. 2008. "Reining in the Passions: the Allegorical Interpretation of Parmenides B Fragment 1." American Journal of Philology no. 129:199-230.

"Abstract. This article attempts to determine whether Parmenides intended the chariot imagery of his poem to be construed allegorically, as argued by Sextus Empiricus. Modern interpreters have rejected the allegorical reading, arguing that Sextus was biased by Plato, the allegory’s true author. There are, however, reasons to believe that a tradition (either native or imported) of employing the chariot image allegorically preexisted Plato and Parmenides. This article argues that Parmenides was drawing upon such a tradition and did portray mind as a charioteer upon a path of knowledge, and impulse as the horses, requiring guidance in order to reach the destination." (p. 199)
Lebedev, Andrei V. 2017. "Parmenides, ΑΝΗΡ ΠΥΘΑΓΟΡΕΙΟΣ. Monistic Idealism (Mentalism) in Archaic Greek Metaphysics." Indo-European Linguistics and Classical Philology no. 21:495-536.

Proceedings of the 21st Conference in Memory of Professor Joseph M. Tronsky.

"In our view there is only one possibility to make philosophical sense of Parmenides' poem: to take seriously the ancient tradition on his Pythagorean background and to interpret his metaphysics as monistic idealism or immaterialism. The sphere of Being described in the Aletheia is not a lump of dead matter, but the divine Sphairos of the Western Greek philosophical theology known from Xenophanes and Empedocles, conceived as pure Nous (Mind) which is the only true reality. The identity of Being and Mind is explicitly stated by Parmenides in fr. B 3, Zeller's and Burnet's interpretation is grammatically impossible and never occurred to any ancient reader. «What-is», conceived as a sphere of divine light endowed with consciousness, is also the invisible «Sun of Justice» (the Sun that «never sets»), an archaic idea known to Heraclitus and imitated by Plato in the allegory of the Sun in the Republic. Night (the symbol of body and corporeal matter) does not exist, it is an empty name resulting from a linguistic mistake of mortals who misnamed the absence of light as a separate substance. The Kouros of the Proem is not Parmenides himself, but an Apollonian image of his venerated teacher Pythagoras whose soul ascended to the celestial temple (oracle) of gods in a winged chariot and received there an oracular revelation from Aletheia herself, a great gift to humanity that liberated men from the veil of ignorance and fear of death. The first part of Parmenides' poem was not just an exercise in speculative metaphysics concerned with problems of motion and plurality, but a handbook of philosophical theology and practical psychology with ethical and political implications: the attributes of the divine absolute are paradigmatic for the personality of an ideal citizen abiding to law (Dike) and a warrior who has no fear of death and pain, since he knows that his soul is immortal and his body is just a «shadow of smoke» (σκιὰ καπνοῦ). The immobility of the divine Sphere is not a physical theory, but an image for meditation, a psychological paradigm of the ataraxia and tranquility (hesychia) of the wise who has eradicated all passions and has assimilated his psyche to god following Pythagoras’command ἕπου θεῶι." (pp. 497-498)
———. 2019. "Idealism (mentalism) in Early Greek metaphysics and philosophical theology: Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Xenophanes and others (with some remarks on the «Gigantomachia about being» in Plato's Sophist)." In Indo-European Linguistics and Classical Philology - XXIII - Proceedings of the 23rd Conference in Memory of Professor Joseph M. Tronsky, 651-704. Sankt-Peterburgurg: Hayka.

"Abstract and table of contents:

(1) Preliminary criticism of the presuppositions of the denial of existence of idealism in early Greek thought: pseudohistorical evolutionism, Platonocentrism that ignores the archaic features of Plato’s metaphysics and psychology, and the modern stereotype of «Presocratics» as physicalists, a product of the late 19th century (excessive) positivist reaction against Hegelianism and German idealism in the English-speaking historiography of Greek philosophy.

(..)

(7) The identity of Being and Mind in Parmenides. A refutation of the grammatically impossible anti-idealist interpretation of fr. B 3 by Zeller, Burnet and their followers. Parmenides’ Kouros is a poetic image of Pythagoras as the originator of the Western Greek monotheistic theology of the noetic One, conceived as a Sphere of immutable thinking divine light (the conceptual metaphor of the Invisible Sun of Justice that «never sets»).

(8) The psychological and ethical dimensions of the Eleatic doctrine of Being, almost totally neglected in the mainstream of the post-Burnetean literature. The Pythagorean doctrine of the indestructible soul serves as a practical tool of military psychological engineering: the education of fearless warriors. Strabo’s commonly neglected report on invincible Eleatic warriors, educated by Parmenides’ nomoi, is to be taken seriously.

(9) The «battle of gods and giants over being» (Gigantomachia peri tes ousias) in Plato’s Sophist 246a as a testimony on the Preplatonic metaphysical idealism (mentalism). It is argued that the two warring camps should not be confined to contemporary atomists and academics only: the whole Ionian (naturalism) and Italian (idealism) traditions, mentioned in Plato’s context, are meant, i.e. the whole history of Greek philosophy.

(10) Some clarifications on the use of the terms idealism, naturalism, dualism etc."
Lecznar, Adam. 2020. "Parmenides at his Typewriter: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Media of Philosophy." In Classics and Media Theory, edited by Michelakis, Pantelis. New York: Oxford University Press.

Abstract: "This chapter seeks to explore two writers who are crucial to the history of media theory, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, and to show how their appeals to the Presocratic philosophers regularly touched on issues of deep importance to understanding the connections between philosophy and materiality. Drawing on the seminal work of Friedrich Kittler, the chapter traces the constellation of the central mediating symbols of the body, the hand, and the typewriter in Nietzsche and Heidegger,

and argues that both writers stage their returns to the Presocratics in order to reflect on the correct media of philosophy."
Lee, Harold N. 1953. "Father Parmenides; or, Further Concerning Negative Facts." The Journal of Philosophy no. 50:70-74.

"The doctrine that there are negative facts is well supported in a recent article in this JOURNAL,(1) even though the author does not unqualifiedly espouse the position. He argues that the same reasons which show that there are any facts at all operate to show that there are negative facts. Nevertheless, he does not seem to be wholly convinced by his own argument. Neither am I convinced.

The thing to do with an argument that appears sound but does not produce conviction is to examine its premises with some care.

Mr. Taylor states on page 435 (and again on page 436): "Something surely seems wrong here, and one feels that a bit of analysis should clear it all up." I think that a bit of analysis does clear it up. What is called for is the analysis of the meaning of the

term "fact" in both his premises and argument. I shall endeavor to show that such analysis sheds a good deal of light on the problem." (p. 70)

(1) Richard Taylor, "Negative Things," this JOURNAL, Vol. XLIX (June 19, 1952), pp. 433-449.
Lesher, James H. 1984. "Parmenides' Critique of Thinking: the poludêris elenchos of Fragment 7." Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy no. 2:1-30.

"It is reasonable to suppose that Parmenides' primary objective in writing his famous poem was to provide a correct account of what exists. Much of the long argument of Fragment 8 is aimed at establishing the attributes of 'the real' (to eon), and it is the teaching of Fragment 6 that all thinking and speaking must be about the real. Yet we should remember that the goddess who delivers Parmenides' message announces in Fragment 1 that we will learn also about 'mortal beliefs' (brotôn doxas) and `the things believed' (ta dokounta). The argument of Fragment 2 begins by listing the ways of enquiry that are 'available for thinking' (noesai). Parmenides' poem is therefore both an enquiry into being and an enquiry into thinking, and his positive theory is both about being and about thinking. In what follows, I offer an account of Parmenides' critique of human thinking, focusing on the crucial, but largely misunderstood, idea of thepoludêris elenchos mentioned briefly at the end of Fragment 7. I shall argue that in the motif of the deris Parmenides expressed a view of the human capacities for independent thinking that departed from an older and derogatory view, and that by adapting the older idea of the elenchos to a new, philosophical, use, he introduced an influential decision procedure into philosophical enquiry." (p. 1)
———. 1994. "The Significance of κατά πάντ΄ ά<σ>τη in Parmenides Fr. 1.3." Ancient Philosophy no. 14:1-20.

"Few of the problematic aspects of Parmenides' poem have proven more resistant to solution than the famous crux contained in the first sentence of his Fr. 1 (following our best MS, N= Laur. 85.19, of Sextus' adversus Mathematicos vii 111)"

(...)

"For more than fifty years, from the publication in 1912 of the third edition of DK [Diels-Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker] until 1968, it was widely supposed that N actually contained the phrase κατά πάντ΄ άστη -- 'down to, along, on, or among all cities', but A.H. Coxon disposed of that idea when he reported that DK's άστη was actually a misreading of the MS, caused perhaps by a passing glance at the αστι in the πολύφραστοι in the adjacent line. Coxon' s claim that N contained άτη and not άστη was subsequently corroborated by Tarán

1977; a photocopy of Laur. 85.19. f. 124v. clearly showing the άτη has since been published in Coxon's 1986. (pp. 1-2)

"Nevertheless, I believe, and will proceed to argue, that a good case can be made for restoring άστη by emendation as the original text of Parmenides' Fr. 1.3. The case will consist of showing how, when viewed in the larger context of early Greek poetry, κατά πάντ΄ άστη can be seen to possess an entirely natural meaning and, in concert with virtually every other feature in the opening lines of Fr. 1, contribute to a single, appropriate objective for the proem as a whole. The immediate question, then, is essentially a philological matter, but to answer it we must consider how Parmenides' views, aims, and methods might have been shaped by the artistic and intellectual traditions of his time and place." (p. 2)
———. 1994. "The Emergence of Philosophical Interest in Cognition." Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy no. 12:1-34.

See § 4: Parmenides' way of knowing, pp. 24-34.

"To the list of Parmenides' contributions to Greek philosophy we should, therefore, add what might best be described as an adaptation of a familiar 'peirastic' paradigm of knowledge for use in the context of philosophical enquiry and reflection. But, having recognized this, we might also want to view Socrates' denial of any involvement with Presocratic ideas about knowledge with some scepticism. At least when the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues sets out to discover the nature of the virtues by putting a series of rival definitions to the test-hoping to find a λόγος that will remain steadfast throughout the entire process of examination his approach represents not a repudiation of earlier views of knowledge, but rather a continuation and extension of them." (p. 34, notes omotted)
———. 2002. "Parmenidean Elenchos." In Does Socrates Have a Method? Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato's Dialogues and Beyond, edited by Scott, Gary Alan, 19-35. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

This paper is a revised version of Lesher 1984.

"The present account differs from the 1984 paper in (1) omitting any discussion of the novelty of Parmenides' view of thought as subject to the control of the individual and (2) offering a different analysis of the structure of Parmenides' main argument. My view of the development of the meaning of elenchos from Homer to the fourth century and its meaning in Parmenides' poem remains unchanged. In the sixteen years since to Oxford Studies paper appeared, the has been relatively little discussion of the meaning of elenchos in Parmenides' proem (and a great deal about the Socratic elenchus), but the view of elenchos as a "test" or "examination" has been endorsed in several accounts: A. H. Coxon, The Fragments of Parmenides (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1986); David J. Furley, Cosmic Problems: Essays in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Patricia Curd, The Legacy of Parmenides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)." (p. 19)

"The upshot of the present analysis is that Parmenides' polude¯ris elenchos was a "controversial but forceful testing" of the possible ways of thinking and speaking about what is. By adapting the older idea of an elenchos or dokimasia of a person’s qualifications or a thing’s true nature to consider the merits of alternative conceptions of the nature of what is, Parmenides succeeded in mounting an effective presentation of his view in the face of competing accounts and a well-entrenched common sense." (p. 34)
———. 2020. "Parmenides on Knowing What-is and What-is-not." Anais de Filosofia Clássica no. 28:59-80.

Abstract: "Parmenides presented himself to his audiences as one who had achieved a profound insight into the nature of to eon or “what-is.” In support of this claim he conducted an elenchos or “testing” of the ways of inquiry available for thinking, in the process revealing a set of informative sêmata or “signs.” In this respect Parmenides was speaking the language of discovery heard elsewhere in early Greek poetry. Similarly, his claim that we can neither learn nor know about what-is-not (hence must not say or think “it is not”) was justified by the ordinary meaning of the ancient Greek verbs for learning and knowing. Strikingly, Parmenides’ revisionary metaphysics rested in large measure on a widely shared view of what can be learned, known, and made known to others."
Lewis, Frank A. 2009. "Parmenides' Modal Fallacy." Phronesis.A Journal for Ancient Philosophy no. 54:1-8.

Abstract: "In his great poem, Parmenides uses an argument by elimination to select the correct "way of inquiry" from a pool of two, the ways of is and of is not, joined later by a third, "mixed" way of is and is not. Parmenides' first two ways are soon given modal upgrades - is becomes cannot not be, and is not becomes necessarily is not (B2, 3-6) - and these are no longer contradictories of one another. And is the common view right, that Parmenides rejects the "mixed" way because it is a contradiction? I argue that the modal upgrades are the product of an illicit modal shift. This same shift, built into two Exclusion Arguments, gives Parmenides a novel argument to show that the "mixed" way fails. Given the independent failure of the way of is not, Parmenides' argument by elimination is complete." (p. 1)
Liu, Qinmeng. 2023. "Preliminary Study on Parmenides and the Origin of Greek Dialectic." In Proceedings of the 2022 5th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2022), edited by Holl, Augustin, Chen, ‎Jun and Guan, Guiyun, 2174-2178. Paris: Atlantis Press.

Abstract: "The thesis is a discussion on Parmenides and the origin of Greek dialectic.

By reviewing the main opinions on the discoverer of dialectic, we confirm that Parmenides is the discoverer of dialectic, both Plato and Aristotle provide us with potent evidences, and from their reports we can also find a line of development of Greek dialectic from Parmenides to Aristotle. In addition, we also observe the background of Parmenides’ dialectical philosophy, it has a wide range of sources from previous philosophies. Through dialectic, Parmenides thoroughly changed the whole trend of Greek philosophy, and instilled new subjects and method into it."
Livingston, Paul M. 2024. "Unity and Predication in Plato’s Parmenides and Nāgārjuna’s Root Verses " In Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave: Buddhist-Platonist Philosophical Inquiries, edited by Carpenter, Amber D. and Harter, Pierre-Julien, 96-116. New York: Oxford University Press.

Abstract: " I consider in parallel some main argumentative strategies of Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā [MMK] and the “dialectical exercise” of the second part of Plato’s Parmenides. I argue that both can usefully be seen as critically targeting the kind of unity that is attributed to entities in treating them as coherent and individual subjects of predication. Both tend to show, moreover, that it is ultimately incoherent to suppose, with respect to any such subject of predication, either that it i) has the relevant kind of intrinsic unity or ii) lacking such a unity, does not exist at all. This suggests that (as I argue with reference to Plato’s Sophist and Plotinus’s Enneads) the philosopher’s attempt to identify and define an unconditional and ultimately consistent logical structure underlying predication in general cannot succeed. Nevertheless, I suggest that by understanding language and ordinary usage as themselves conditioned phenomena, we may see the results of such attempts as delimiting the more restricted domain of what Nāgārjuna calls “conventional” or “ordinary” (saṁvṛiti) truth in such a way as simultaneously to evince the “ultimate” (paramārtha) truth of the emptiness of all phenomena. Specifically, we may see the contradictory conclusions of both Plato’s analysis in the Parmenides and Nāgārjuna’s analysis in the MMK as pointing, not toward a superior and more consistent regulative structure of categories or of logical forms, but rather to a possible overcoming of the “habit” of reifying conceptualization that is deep-seated in ordinary language and practice, and thereby to the soteriological benefits often associated, in Buddhist contexts, with such an overcoming."
Llewelyn, John. 2015. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spell of John Duns Scotus. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Chapter 3: Parsing the Poem of Parmenides, pp. 19-29.

"If we use the word ‘Being’ to translate Parmenides’ tò έόν as that English word was used at the time when while an undergraduate at Oxford Hopkins wrote his piece on that thinker’s poem, we should heed John Burnet’s observation that ‘Parmenides does not say a word about “Being” anywhere . . . We must not render τò έόν by “Being”, das Sein or l’être. It is “What is”, das Seiende, ce qui est. As (τò) εîναi it does not occur, and hardly could occur at this date.’(1)" (p. 19)

(...)

"To foredraw is to think or perceive, noein.(7) This is to grasp not only universals or essences (essentia) in their anticipative, predelineative or ‘foredrawing’ capacity. It is also to posit entities (entia) in the undistributable singularity of their momentary or continuant real existence. As Hopkins is encouraged to say by Parmenides and, we shall see, by Scotus, without the entitivity of entia, and with a nounhood isolated from a verbhood centred on the verb ‘to be’, thinking would fall short of metaphysical and natural scientia, because thinking would fall short of sameness in difference – thinking would fall short of itself.(8)" (p. 20)

(1) The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, [House, H. (ed.) (1937), London: Oxford University Press] p. 362

(7) Ibid. p. 100.

(8) Incidentally, a typographical dash is called in Danish a tankestreg, a think-stroke.
Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard. 1962. "Right and Left in Greek Philosophy." The Journal of Hellenic Studies no. 82:56-66.

"The purpose of this article is to consider how the symbolic associations which right and left had for the ancient Greeks influenced various theories and explanations in Greek philosophy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The fact that certain manifest natural oppositions (e.g. right and left, male and female, light and darkness, up and down) often acquire powerful symbolic associations, standing for religious categories such as pure and impure, blessed and accursed, is well attested by anthropologists for many present-day societies. Robert Hertz, in particular, has considered the significance of the widespread belief in the superiority of the right hand, in his essay 'La préeminence de la main droite: étude sur la polarité religieuse' [Revue Philosophique lxviii (1909), 553 ff., recently translated into English by R. and C. Needham in Death and the Right Hand (London, 1960) 89 ff.).

It is, of course, well known that the ancient Greeks shared some similar beliefs, associating right and left with lucky and unlucky, respectively, and light and darkness with safety, for example, and death. Yet the survival of certain such associations in Greek philosophy has

not, I think, received the attention it deserves. I wish to document this aspect of the use of opposites in Greek philosophy in this paper, concentrating in the main upon the most interesting pair of opposites, right and left. Before I turn to the evidence in the philosophers

themselves, two introductory notes are necessary. In the first, I shall consider briefly some of the evidence in anthropology which indicates how certain pairs of opposites are associated with, and symbolise, religious categories in many present-day societies. The second

contains a general summary of the evidence for similar associations and beliefs in prephilosophical Greek thought." (p. 56)
———. 1964. "The Hot and the Cold, the Dry and the Wet in Greek Philosophy." The Journal of Hellenic Studies no. 84:92-106.

"In a previous article ([Right and Left in Greek Philosophy] JHS lxxxii ( I 962) 56 ff.) I examined some of the theories and explanations which appear in Greek philosophy and medicine in the period down to Aristotle, in which reference is made to right and left or certain other pairs of opposites (light and darkness, male and female, up and down, front and back), and I argued that several of these theories are influenced by the symbolic associations which these opposites possessed for the ancient Greeks. In the present paper I wish to consider the use of the two pairs of opposites which are most prominent of all in early Greek speculative thought, the hot and the cold, and the dry and the wet. My discussion is divided into two parts.

In the first I shall examine the question of the origin of the use of these opposites in Greek philosophy. How far back can we trace their use in various fields of speculative thought, and what was the significance of their introduction into cosmology in particular? And then in the second part of my paper I shall consider to what extent theories based on these opposites may have been influenced by assumptions concerning the values of the opposed terms. Are these opposites, too, like right and left, or inale and female, sometimes conceived as consisting of on the one hand a positive, or superior pole, and on the other a negative, or inferior one?· How far do we find that arbitrary correlations were made between these and other pairs of terms, that is to say correlations that correspond to preconceived notions of value, rather than to any empirically verifiable data?" (p. 92)
———. 1966. Polarity and Analogy, Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press.

"The aims of this study are to describe and analyse two main types of argument and methods of explanation as they are used in early Greek thought from the earliest times down to and including Aristotle, and to consider them, in particular, in relation to the larger problem of the development of logic and scientific method in this period." (p. 1)

"In Fr. 2 Parmenides puts a choice between two alternatives as if these were the only alternatives conceivable.

But even if we disregard the vagueness or ambiguity of έστι, the ‘propositions' which Parmenides expresses are not contradictories (of which one must be true and the other false), but contraries, both of which it is possible to deny simultaneously, and it is clear that from the point of view of strict logic they are not exhaustive alternatives.

Fr. 8 throws more light on Parmenides' conception of the choice between ‘it is' and ‘it is not'. The addition of the word πάμπαν in Fr. 8 11 should be noted. What he means by the word ‘wholly' in the sentence 'thus it needs must be either that it is wholly or that it is not' becomes clear when we consider the remainder of Fr. 8 where he argues that ‘what is' is ungenerated and indestructible (vv. 6-21), immovable and unchangeable.(1) ‘What is not', conversely, is said to be inconceivable (8 f., 17, 34 ff.), and we are told that nothing can ever come to be from what is not (7 ff., 12 f.). The two alternatives between which Parmenides wishes a choice to be made might, then, be expressed, in this context, as unalterable existence on the one hand, and unalterable non-existence on the other. But if this is so, Parmenides' alternatives, stated in the form of propositions, are again a pair of contrary, not contradictory, assertions, for the contradictory of 'it exists unalterably' is 'it does not exist unalterably' and not 'it is unalterably non-existent' . By taking 'it is' and 'it is not' in this sense(2) as exhaustive alternatives in Fr. 8 11 and again in 16 (‘it is or it is not'), Parmenides forces an issue. Physical objects, subject to change, cannot be said to 'be' in the sense of 'exist unalterably' which Parmenides evidently demands: but since he allows no other alternative besides unalterable existence and unalterable non-existence, then, according to this argument, physical objects must be said not to exist at all, indeed to be quite inconceivable." (pp. 104-105)

(1) See ακίνητον at Fr. 8 26, and the denial of all sorts of change at 38 ff.

(2) Even if we take έστι in a predicative, rather than an existential, sense, Parmenides’ choice again seems to lie between a pair of contrary assertions, i.e. between 'it is wholly so-and-so' (e.g. black) and 'it is wholly not-so-and-so' (not black), rather than between contradictories ('it is wholly so-and-so' and 'it is not wholly so-and-so').
———. 1972. "Parmenides' Sexual Theories. A Reply to Mr Kember." The Journal of Hellenic Studies no. 92:178-179.

Abstract: "In an article entitled ‘Right and left in the sexual theories of Parmenides' (Journal of Hellenic Studies XCI [1971] 70–79) Mr. Owen Kember challenges my statement (Polarity and Analogy [1966] 17) that ‘Parmenides probably held that the sex of the child is determined by its place on the right or left of the mother's womb (right for males, left for females)'. In his article Kember draws attention, usefully, to the confusions and contradictions of the doxographic tradition. He has, however, in my view, misinterpreted one crucial piece of evidence. This is the testimony of Galen, who quotes Parmenides Fragment 17 (δεξιτεροῖσιν μὲν κούρους, λαιοῖσι δὲ κούρας) in the course of his commentary on [Hippocrates] Epidemics vi ch. 48. Kember notes, correctly, that the meaning of the fragment by itself is quite unclear: 'the only deduction which can be safely made from the actual fragment is that Parmenides thought right and left were somehow connected with sex, and even here we must rely on Galen's judgement that the passage did in fact refer to sex in the first place' (op. cit. 76)."
Loenen, Johannes Hubertus. 1959. Parmenides, Melissus, Gorgias: A Reinterpretation of Eleatic Philosophy. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Part I: Parmenides Περί Φύσεως, pp. 6-124.

"The philosophy of the Eleatics has at all times aroused interest, not only in historians of philosophy, but also in wide circles of philosophers who realize that the theories of important thinkers of the past belong to philosophical speculation itself. Since the present study, though based primarily on a philological method, proposes an interpretation of Eleaticism which puts the development of pre-Socratic philosophy as a whole in a new light, it seemed desirable to the author to try to make it accessible to non-specialists as well. This might at the same time help to bridge the gulf actually existing in the field of ancient philosophy between philologists and philosophers. But if one wants to interest the philosophers without failing to satisfy the just demands on the part of the philologists, the only possible method would appear to be to discuss philological points as far as possible in notes. In spite of the drawbacks involved in this method I have followed it wherever possible. Consequently I would draw the attention of philologists particularly to the notes. Meanwhile the fact must not be disguised that the present study is essentially an interpretation of texts, so that the reader will constantly be referred to the “Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.” Philosophers will thus have to go through a much larger amount of philological detail than they are used to, but they too will sometimes find indispensable explanations in the notes." (Preface, p. 1)

"Having come to the end of the first part of my inquiry, I feel bound to express my great admiration of this philosopher, who possessed intellectual powers that are almost incredible at so early a stage of the history of philosophy. In conclusion I would say that he must not be looked upon as the father either of materialism or of idealism, but that he may indeed be considered the first representative of dualistic metaphysics and of a realistic form of epistemological rationalism. He discovered the unity and invariability of the concept, though only as regards the idea of being (he was struck by its transcendental character, in the pre-Kantian sense of the word) and at the same time he was the first to surmise the existence of an extra-spatial and extra¬ temporal metaphysical reality, which to him still formed an insepa¬ rable unity with its idea. Even though the appreciation of philosophical opponents of the school of thought of which Parmenides is the first representative may be a little more moderate than mine, I think no one will venture to deny the truth of Plato’s statement that he possessed a βάθος (...) παντάπασι γενναῖον (Theaet. 183 e)." (p. 124)
Long, Anthony Arthur. 1963. "The Principles of Parmenides' Cosmogony." Phronesis.A Journal for Ancient Philosophy no. 8:90-107.

Reprinted in: D. J. Furley and R. E. Allen (eds.), Studies in Presocratic Philosophy. Vol. II: The Eleatic and the Pluralists, London,: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 82-101.

"The significance claimed by Parmenides for the cosmogony which forms the second half of his poem continues to be highly controversial. The interpretations offered by Owen and Chalmers, to name two recent criticisms, are so widely divergent that one might despair of arriving at any measure of agreement. (2) But since the significance of The Way of Truth must itself remain in some doubt until the status of the cosmogony is determined, further examinations of the evidence are justified. The purpose of this article is to discuss the passages throughout the poem which are concerned with mortal beliefs, and to suggest an interpretation of the fundamental lines 50-61 of B 8. (3) In this way the function of the cosmogony may, I believe, become clearer.

Of the solutions to the problem suggested by ancient and modern critics, four main trends can be discerned:

I. The cosmogony is not Parmenides' own but a systematized account of contemporary beliefs.

2. The cosmogony is an extension of The Way of Truth.

3. The cosmogony has relative validity as a second-best explanation of the world.

4. Parmenides claims no truth for the cosmogony.

The first view, canvassed by Zeller and modified by Burnet to a 'sketch of contemporary Pythagorean cosmology', finds few adherents among modern scholars. (4) It has never been explained, on this interpretation, why the goddess should be made to expound in detail a critique of fallacious theories. Bowra (5) has taught us to see the poem as demonstrably apocalyptic, and Parmenides needed no goddess's patronage to set forth his contemporaries' cosmological systems. Moreover, there is nothing in the later part of the poem which can be explicitly attributed to any attested philosopher. The doxographers in general, from Aristotle, assign the cosmogony to Parmenides himself.

The second and third views above have received much support. It is argued, following Aristotle, (6) that Parmenides cannot have countenanced absolute denial of phenomena. Such an explanation, however, fails entirely to account for the later activity of the Eleatics, and is quite at variance with the evidence of the poem. It belittles the achievement of Parmenides, and fails to take into account the evidence in favour of 4., even when this is equivocal. I shall argue that the cosmogony gives a totally false picture of reality; that it is the detailed exposition of the false way mentioned in The Way of Truth (B 6.4-9) and promised by the goddess in the proem (B 1. 30-32); that it takes its starting point from the premise of that false way, the admission of Not-being alongside Being, not from the introduction of two opposites, Fire and Night; and finally, that its function is entirely ancillary to the Way of Truth, in the sense of offering the exemplar, par excellence, of all erroneous systems, as a criterion for future measurement."

(2) G. E. L. Owen, 'Eleatic Questions', Classical Quarterly NS X (1960), pp. 84-102, above, pp. 48-81; W. R. Chalmers, 'Parmenides and the Beliefs of Mortals', Phronesis V (1960), pp. 5-22.

(3) All fragments of Parmenides are quoted from Diels-Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin 1951).

(4) J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London 1930), p. 185.

(5) C. M. Bowra, 'The Proem of Parmenides', Classical Philology XXXII, 2 (1937), pp. 97-112.

(6) Cf. Aristotle, Met. A5 986 b 18.
———. 1996. "Parmenides on Thinking Being." Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy no. 12:125-151.

With a commentary by Stanley Rosen, pp. 152-162.

Reprinted in: G. Reschnauer (ed.), Frügriechisches Denken, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005, pp. 227-251.

"At the end of one of his studies of Parmenides Heidegger wrote: "The dialogue with Parmenides never comes to an end, not only because so much in the preserved fragments of his 'Didactic Poem' still remains obscure, but also because what is said there continually deserves more thought."(1) Heidegger's diagnosis of the reasons for "this unending dialogue" is instructive-Parmenides' obscurity, on the one hand, and secondly, the merit of his words as a provocation of thought." (p. 125)

(...)

"In this paper I want to elucidate Parmenides' project on the assumption that we should approach him as a philosopher whose primary concern was to explore the activity of veridical thinking, and to identify its subject and object." (p. 126)

(...)

"Drawing upon his own philosophy, Heidegger offered a number of suggestions—some of them challenging, others perverse— about the way Parmenides took thinking to relate to Being. If I understand Heidegger, he tried to get inside the mind at work in Parmenides' poem, with a view to showing what it is like to think Being with Parmenides. My paper, though it is totally different from Heidegger's in method and findings, has that much in common with his.(5) I propose that Parmenides' first call on us is not to think about Being but to think about thinking Being (6). In modern jargon, Parmenides' project is a second-order inquiry. He is not purely or primarily a metaphysician. He is investigating mind, from the starting point that something is there—Being or truth—for mind to think." (p. 127)
———. 2019. "Poets as philosophers and philosophers as poets : Parmenides, Plato, Lucretius, and Wordsworth." In Logoi and Muthoi: Further Essays in Greek Philosophy and Literature, edited by Wians, William, 319-334. Albany: State University of New York Press.

"I cannot prove that Parmenides, my earliest philosopher poet, was already familiar with the Greek use of poiesis for poetry specifically. But we can confidently assume that his poem was designed to strike his hearers as a supremely creative production, inspired by the unnamed goddess who instructs “the man who knows” in the respective “ways” of Truth and Opinion. It is often assumed that Parmenides wrote in verse because prose at this date (about 500 BCE) was not yet an established form of composition, but I find this proposal unconvincing. Heraclitus and other early “scientific” writers composed in prose. Parmenides’s choice of verse was clearly deliberate and not continued by his Eleatic successor Zeno. Diogenes Laertius (9.22) couples Parmenides as a philosophical poet with Hesiod, Xenophanes, and Empedocles, but the association obscures big differences between these four authors. Hesiod, whether or not we call him a philosopher, was an epic poet at a time when epic poetry was the only literary genre. Xenophanes was a professional rhapsode, who recited his poems at symposia. Empedocles’s hexameter poetry alludes to Parmenides, but, unlike Parmenides, Empedocles also wrote poems on non-philosophical themes; and his choice of verse for his great poem on nature may well have been influenced by his strong sympathies with Orphism and Orphism’s use of hexameter poetry. We need to explain Parmenides’s choice of verse through his particular intention and message.

I propose to examine his work as a philosopher poet by reference to four criteria—speculative creativity, cultural authority, emotional intensity, and memorable phraseology. Once I have done that, I shall proceed to apply these criteria to my other three philosopher poets." (p. 324)
Loux, Michael J. 1992. "Aristotle and Parmenides: An Interpretation of Physics A.8." Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy no. 8:281-319.

With a commentary by Arthur Madigan, pp. 320-326.

"Parmenides' argument for the impossibility of change so dominated Greek thinking that we can expect it to loom large in Aristotle's discussion of coming to be in Physics A, and we are not disappointed. After presenting his own analysis of coming to be in Physics A.7, Aristotle devotes all of A.8 to the argument.(1)" (p. 281)

(1) In attempting to understand Aristotle's response to the Parmenidean argument, one is struck by the fact that recent literature on A.8 seldom attempts to work through the difficult text of A.8. Those writing on the chapter typically provide inferential reconstructions of Aristotle's reply to Parmenides. As philosophically interesting as those reconstructions are, they tend to leave large chunks of the text unexplained. This paper is an attempt to identify the line of argument Aristotle actually employs in A.8. Its method is unabashedly that of extended philosophical commentary. I do not claim to have explanations of every line of the chapter, but I hope the paper goes some distance towards delineating the main contours of the argument of A.8. I make no apologies for my somewhat tedious attention to the details of Aristotle's response to Parmenides since I believe that clarity on the text of A.8 is a prerequisite to more general philosophical reflection of the sort that has typified recent literature on this chapter.

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