- Length
- 24 pagesCoxon, The Fragments of Parmenides, rev. ed. 2009 - the Greek text with facing translation
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
On Nature
The first sustained deductive argument in Western philosophy, delivered by a goddess in verse, and it concludes that nothing whatever changes. About 160 lines survive out of a poem nobody has seen entire since antiquity. Everything after it in Greek thought is in some sense a response to the problem it left behind: if the argument is valid, the world we live in cannot be real, and if the world is real, something in the argument must be wrong.
- Date
- c. 475 BC
- Author
- Parmenides of Elea
- Region
- Elea, southern Italy
- Language
- Ancient Greek
- 1892 English, John Burnet Public domain; still the most reprinted English version Attested
- 1986 English, A. H. Coxon Greek text with facing translation and full testimonia Attested
- 1984 English, David Gallop Fragments with facing Greek Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 115 years
No copy of the poem survives. Every line printed today was quoted by a later writer for his own purposes, and the ordering is a modern reconstruction still under argument.
What the book says
A hexameter poem in three parts. It opens with a chariot ride: a young man is carried by the daughters of the Sun along a road away from the ordinary world, through a great gate, to a goddess who greets him and promises to tell him everything. What she tells him is an argument, and it is short and violent. There are only two ways of enquiry that can be thought of. One is that it is, and that it is impossible for it not to be. The other is that it is not, and that is no road at all, because what is not cannot be thought or spoken of. Follow the first road and consequences fall out one after another: what is cannot come to be, since it would have to come from what is not; it cannot perish, cannot change, cannot move, cannot be more here and less there. It is whole, unmoving, complete, held fast in limits, and one. The second half of the poem then turns round and gives a full account of the ordinary world of light and night, stars and reproduction, while stating plainly that this is the way mortals believe and is not the truth. Why she gives it at all is the poem's oldest unsolved problem.
What it argues
That being admits of no negation, and that everything we ordinarily believe follows from a negation somewhere. To say that a thing comes into existence is to say it previously was not. To say it moves is to say it is not where it was. To say it is one kind of thing rather than another is to say it is not the other. If what-is-not cannot be thought or said at all, every one of those statements collapses, and with them coming-to-be, perishing, motion, and difference. What remains is one thing, whole and unchanging. The argument is not offered as a paradox or a provocation. It is offered as a proof.
What answered it
Plato answers it directly in the Sophist, and does so under his own name for the problem: to explain how a false statement is possible, he must show that what-is-not can be spoken of after all, and he calls this parricide against his philosophical father. His solution is that not-being is difference rather than sheer absence. Aristotle answers a different part in the Physics, arguing that being is said in more than one way and that potentiality bridges the gap Parmenides declared unbridgeable. Both answers concede the force of the original. Neither pretends the argument was silly.
How it argues
In dactylic hexameter, the metre of Homer and Hesiod, and framed as a revelation from a goddess. That combination is deliberate and awkward: the content is the most rigorous chain of inference anyone had yet written down, and the form is the one reserved for divine authority. Readers have argued for two centuries about whether the verse is a concession to convention, a mystical claim that reason is itself a kind of initiation, or simply the only vehicle available for a long argument in a culture that memorised poetry. Nothing in the poem settles it.
The moment
Elea was a Greek colony on the coast of southern Italy, founded by refugees within living memory. Philosophy up to this point had mostly been cosmology - the Milesians asking what the world is made of and how it came to be arranged. Parmenides does not offer a rival substance. He asks whether the question is coherent at all, and that shift, from what the world is made of to what it means to say that anything is, is the reason the Greeks after him could not simply carry on as before.
How it travelled
By quotation, and by luck. Sextus Empiricus gives thirty of the thirty-two lines of the opening, apparently working from a Hellenistic digest rather than a manuscript. Simplicius, writing in the sixth century AD, seems to have owned a good copy and quoted from it at length in his commentaries on Aristotle - he says himself that he is transcribing generously because the book had become rare. Almost everything we have of the argument proper comes from that decision. The poem then vanishes. What is printed today is a reconstruction assembled from those quotations by editors who disagree about the order.
The strongest objection
That the argument proves too much. A conclusion which entails that the reader is not reading, because reading takes time and involves change, is one most philosophers treat as a reductio of some premise rather than a discovery about the world. The suspect premise is usually the first: that what-is-not cannot be thought or spoken. We appear to think about absences constantly. Parmenides has no answer to this because the objection was not available to him in that form; it took Plato to make it, which is exactly what the Sophist does.
Why read it
Because it is short, and because nothing else in philosophy is quite this pure. There is no scholarship to master and no vocabulary to learn: a goddess states two alternatives, eliminates one, and follows the other wherever it goes without flinching at the destination. Whether the reader ends up agreeing is beside the point. What the poem demonstrates is what it looks like to follow an argument in preference to the evidence of one's eyes, which is the move the whole subject is built on.
- First printed
- 1573
- First in English
- 1892
- Digitised
- Yes
There is no ancient edition. The standard modern texts are Diels-Kranz, Coxon and Gallop; they differ over the order of the fragments and occasionally over the words.
Burnet's English of 1892 is out of copyright and still circulates. The scholarly translations by Coxon, Gallop and Kirk-Raven-Schofield are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live, and not only historically. The argument that change requires something to come from nothing, and that nothing cannot be the source of anything, is still an active move in metaphysics, and the poem is taught as the origin of the subject rather than as a curiosity that preceded it.
On quoting this book
The Greek is public domain but the ordering is editorial, and the readable English versions are in copyright. No line is quoted.
Contested
The title is not the author's. On Nature had become the generic label for any Presocratic work by the time Sextus was writing, and there is no evidence Parmenides named the poem. The order of the fragments is editorial and disputed, and at least one recent argument holds that lines universally printed as part of the opening belong in the second half instead. The dating is loose by a generation in either direction. The largest question is the second half: why a goddess who has just proved that the sensible world is unreal would then set out a detailed cosmology of it. Proposals include a dialectical exercise, a best-possible account of appearances, and a section wholly ironic. None commands agreement.