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Background
Background
Parmenides was born in Elea, one of the Greek colonies on the land now known as Italy. He is known as ‘the father of Ontology’. Ontology is the study of being: what it means to be something.
De Magna Graecia ancient colonies and dialects
Future Perfect at Sunrisederivative work: Rowanwindwhistler - Este archivo deriva de: Magna Graecia ancient colonies and dialects-en.svg: Future Perfect at Sunrise, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34074672On Nature
On Nature
The only work that has come down to us from Parmenides are fragments of a Poem called On Nature. As well as being fragmentary, the work is often very obscure.
What you can call and think must Being be,
For Being can, and nothing cannot, be.
Never shall this prevail, that Unbeing is,
Rein in your mind from any thought like this.
Unbeing you won’t grasp – it can’t be done,
Nor utter, being thought and being are one.
—ParmenidesAn outline of Parmenides’ argument
An outline of Parmenides’ argument
Everything that you can speak and think about ‘is’ something (and vice versa).
But nothing (or things that ‘are not’) cannot be anything. (Because as soon as you describe it, it is something.)
Therefore, it is impossible to understand what is not.
Discussion
Discussion
What I like about Parmenides is the way he upends many of our assumptions and illuminates the tangles and connections that relate to the verb ‘to be’.
—When we talk about something that is, we might assume that we are talking about something that exists… so some kind of substance, or a particular object, thing or stuff.
—But these are not the only kinds of things that can be something. If I say ‘Harry Potter is friends with Hermione Granger’ then Harry Potter is being something
—but we wouldn’t normally say that Harry Potter exists, because he’s a fictional character.
—What about the number 3? Does the number 3 exist?
—It certainly is a number.
—Let’s try another tack. What kinds of things cannot be? How can we complete the sentence, ‘Nothing is …’?
—‘Nothing is indescribable’,
—but that clearly isn’t true. Plenty of things can be indescribable – hardships, tragedy, beauty, not to mention the fact that various limitations might practically prevent us from describing something.
—‘Nothing is unknown’
— but I don’t know whether aliens exist, so that’s not true.
—‘Nothing is nonexistent’
—so, Harry Potter does exist, then?
The only kinds of answers I can think of to this question are nonsense answers. So, we might say, ‘Nothing is a triangle with four sides’, or ‘nothing is getting younger’.
—But have we defined nothing with these sentences? Does ‘a triangle with four sides’ mean the same as ‘a thing that is getting younger’.
—In the sense that both are nonsense sentences, so perhaps the answer is yes!
—But nothing is a perfectly useful and senseful word that we use all the time.
— but a word is something, so not nothing.
— No! I mean we use the word ‘nothing’ to mean ‘the absence of something’.
—But if I ask myself whether there is space in my box, then I might think ‘yes, because there is nothing in it!’ So, I have space. So, do I have something?
Parmenides’ mysterious poetry makes us feel like we are trapped in language. We want to say things which don’t really make sense but which we still feel mean something; we want to go beyond language. But we can’t.
Tasks
Tasks
Write out and explain the fragment of Parmenides’ poetry.
What do you think of what Parmenides says? Is ‘unbeing’ or ‘nothingness’ unsayable and unthinkable? Does everything that can be described exist?
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