Parmenides

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Parmenides of Elea (Late 6th c.—Mid 5th c. BCE) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia (meaning “Great Greece,” the term which Romans gave to Greek-populated coastal areas in Southern Italy).

Parmenides has been considered the founder of metaphysics (a.k.a. “ontology”) and has influenced the whole history of Western philosophy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, which also included Zeno of Elea. Zeno’s paradoxes of motion were to defend Parmenides’ view. He is one of the most significant and influential (as well as the most difficult and obscure) of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and he is sometimes referred to as the father of Metaphysics. He particularly influenced Plato (and, through him, the whole of Western Philosophy), who always spoke of him with veneration. Perhaps his greatest contribution to philosophy was his method of reasoned proof for assertions. In denying the reality (or even the possibility) of change as part of his Monist philosophy, Parmenides presented a turning point in the history of Western Philosophy, and sparked a philosophical challenge that determined the course of enquiries of subsequent philosophers such as Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus, and an intellectual revolution that still echoes today.

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Let reason alone decide
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— Parmenides

READING LIST &c.

FICTION 📙 120 Days of Sodom 📙 Aeneid 📙 Agamemnon 📙 The Arabian Nights 📙 The Art of Love 📙 Astrophil and Stella 📙 The Bell Jar 📙 Brave New World 📙 The Carnal Prayer Mat 📙 Catch-22 📙 An Opium-Eater 📙 Delta of Venus 📙 The Divine Comedy 📙 Dubliners 📙 Fanny Hill 📙 Flowers of Evil 📙 Gilgamesh 📙 Heart of Darkness 📙 Iliad 📙 The Kama Sutra 📙 King James Bible 📙 Lady and the Dog 📙 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 📙 Lolita 📙 Lord of the Files 📙 Madame Bovary 📙 Metamorphoses 📙 Metamorphosis 📙 Milk and Honey 📙 1984 📙 Odyssey 📙 The Old Man and the Sea 📙 The Oresteia 📙 The Perfumed Garden 📙 The Secret Sharer 📙 Snows of Kilimanjaro 📙 Song of Solomon 📙 Story of O 📙 Story of the Eye 📙 The Trial 📙 Theogony 📙 Tropic of Cancer 📙 Ulysses 📙 Willian Wilson 📙 Yellow Wallpaper NON-FICTION 📙 The Adventure of English 📙 Amusing Ourselves to Death 📙 An Apology for Poetry 📙 De Profundis 📙 A Defence of Poetry 📙 Dream of Enlightenment 📙 Dream of Reason 📙 English as a Global Language 📙 The Four Ages of Poetry 📙 Future Shock 📙 The Golden Bough 📙 Guns, Germs, and Steel 📙 Hammer of Witches 📙 Handbook of Philosophy 📙 History of Philosophy 📙 Illustrated Philosophy 📙 Imagined Communities 📙 The Magic of Reality 📙 Manufacturing Consent 📙 Norton Anthology of English 📙 On Bullshit 📙 Orientalism 📙 Oxford Book of English Verse 📙 Public Opinion 📙 Pursuits of Wisdom 📙 Sapiens 📙 Why We Sleep

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