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Parmenides and Plato were both concerned with ontology (from the Greek 'onta' or being) and questioned the nature of the "real". They both concluded that the world around is a dream or an illusion and that the senses, as opposed to reason, cannot aid us in our quest for truth. Parmenides was the first of the ancient philosophers to make use of deductive argument and he did this in order to underline the dichotomy between …

…parts of Plato's theories cater to what I fundamentally intuit about the world. Perhaps a synthesis is called for. Can we be forgiven for thinking that Parmenides' now size-less sphere is actually non-corporeal yet still 'is'? Can we furthermore suggest that Plato's Forms, being all alike (in that they can all be categorized as Forms), participate in one Form of the Form and that this is one and the same as Parmenides' 'is'? Probably not!