Parmenides argued that change is impossible, and philosophy never quite recovered
In a poem written in epic verse, Parmenides of Elea claimed that reality is a single, timeless, unchanging whole, and that the shifting world our senses report is illusion. That audacious claim made him the founder of ontology, inspired Zeno's paradoxes, and through Plato helped shape all of Western philosophy.
His only known work, usually called On Nature, survives in fragments, but far more of it remains than of most pre-Socratic writings, so scholars can reconstruct his thinking unusually well. It lays out two paths. The way of truth, Aletheia, holds that all is one, that nothing comes to be or passes away, and that existence is uniform. The way of opinion, Doxa, describes the world of appearances, where the senses produce false and deceptive beliefs. Debates in the modern philosophy of time still engage with his arguments.
Even his dates are a puzzle. Apollodorus placed his prime in the 69th Olympiad, 504 to 500 BC, implying birth around 540 BC, but Apollodorus habitually pinned a thinker's fortieth year to some convenient event. Plato's dialogue Parmenides instead depicts him visiting Athens at 65 with his friend Zeno, then 40, and meeting a very young Socrates, likely at the Panathenaic Games of 450 BC; many classicists, including Burnet and Guthrie, therefore favour a birth around 515 BC. Others dismiss the scene as fiction. Whether he was responding to Heraclitus, or Heraclitus came after him, is also disputed.
Ancient tradition names his father as Pires and gives him an aristocratic family in Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy. Sources disagree over his teachers, naming Xenophanes, the Pythagorean Aminias, or Anaximander. Plutarch, Strabo and Diogenes report that he helped govern Elea and gave it an admirable code of laws.
In 1969 excavators at Velia, the later name of Elea, found the base of a first-century AD statue reading Parmenides, son of Pires, followed by two debated words. One may mean simply a native of Velia, or may link him to a medical school devoted to Apollo Ulius, which would make him a physician too; a fragment of his poem with anatomical observations lends that idea some support. His followers, Zeno and Melissus of Samos, formed the Eleatic school.
Source: Parmenides
