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Biography of ParmenidesName: ParmenidesBirth Date: 515 B.C. Death Date: N/A Place of Birth: Elea, Italy Nationality: Greek Gender: Male Occupations: philosopher Parmenides The Greek philosopher Parmenides (active 475 BC) asserted that true being and knowledge, discovered by the intellect, must be distinguished from appearance and opinion, based on the senses. He held that there is an eternal One, which is timeless, motionless, and changeless.Parmenides was born in Elea in southern Italy in the late 6th century B.C. Socrates, in Plato's Thaetetus, tells how as a young man he met Parmenides and Zeno on their visit to Athens about 450. Little else is recorded about the details of Parmenides's life. He wrote a didactic poem in hexameters, the meter of the Homeric epics and of the oracular responses at Delphi, in which he described a divine revelation. Fragments of the poem remain and provide a fair idea of what he attempted to prove, although even when the entire poem was extant there were problems of interpretation.The poem consists of a prologue and …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…mixture of the two governs the makeup of all organic life.Parmenides's importance lies in his insistence on the separation of the intellect and the senses. His allegorical discussion of the paths of thought represents the earliest attempt to deal with the problems of philosophical method. Further Reading The extant fragments of Parmenides's poem are collected in Hermann Diels, ed., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1957), translated by Kathleen Freeman in Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1948) and discussed by her in The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1946; 3d ed. 1953). Excellent discussions and commentaries on Parmenides are in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (1962), and W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy (3 vols., 1962-1969). General discussions of Pre-Socratic philosophy as part of the development of Greek thought may be found in the standard histories of Greek literature, of which a noteworthy example is Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (trans. 1966). |