Greece & Rome · c. 490–430 BCE
Eleatic school
Reason shows that what is cannot come to be, change or be many, so the changing world of the senses is an illusion.
Can what is ever come from what is not?
The Milesians and Heraclitus had described a world of constant transformation. In Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy, Parmenides asked whether such talk was even coherent, and in a poem gave the first sustained deductive argument in Western thought. His pupil Zeno defended him with paradoxes against plurality and motion.
You cannot think or say what is not, because there is nothing there to think. So what is cannot come from nothing, pass into nothing, or change, since change means becoming what one was not. Zeno added that if motion were real, a runner would have to cross infinitely many half-distances, which seemed impossible.
- What is, is; what is not cannot be thought.
- Coming-to-be, change and plurality are illusions of the senses.
- Reason, not perception, is the judge of truth.
It forced every later Greek physics to explain change without creation from nothing, and Zeno’s paradoxes carried debates about infinity into modern mathematics.
Thinkers
c. 515 – after 450 BCEParmenidesFounder of the Eleatic school and of deductive argumentc. 490–430 BCEZeno of EleaParmenides’ pupil, famous for paradoxes of motion and pluralityKey texts
Where it came from
Reacted againstMilesian schoolParmenides argued that the Milesian picture of one stuff becoming many things requires what is not to come into being, which he held impossible.
What it led to
Opposed byPluralistsEmpedocles and Anaxagoras accepted that nothing comes from nothing but rejected the Eleatic denial of change, explaining it as the mixing of many eternal elements.Opposed by
AtomismThe atomists accepted that real being is uncreated and unchanging but, against Parmenides, asserted that empty space exists, which makes motion possible.Opposed by
SophistsGorgias’ On Non-Being turned Eleatic-style argument against itself, perhaps to show that clever logic can prove anything.Carried on by
PlatonismPlato’s Forms inherit the marks of Parmenides’ being: eternal, unchanging and grasped by reason rather than the senses.