Presocratic Philosophers

"Anaxagoras held that, however far you may divide... things—and they are infinitely divisible—you never come to a part so small that it does not contain portions of all the opposites. The smallest portion of bone is... bone. On the other hand, everything can pass into everything else... because the "seeds"... of each form of matter contain a portion of everything... [i.e.,] of all the opposites, though in different proportions. If we... use the word "element" at all, it is these seeds... [T]he "seeds"... he... substituted for the "roots" of Empedokles, were not the opposites in a state of separation, but each contained a portion of them all."

"Though everything has a portion of everything in it, things appear to be that of which there is most in them (fr. 12 sub fin.). ...Air is that in which there is most cold, Fire that in which there is most heat ... [etc.]"

"[T]here is no void in this mixture, an addition... made necessary by... arguments of Parmenides. Anaxagoras added an experimental proof of this to the purely dialectical one of the . He used the klepsydra experiment ... as Empedokles had done... and... showed the corporeal nature of air by means of inflated skins."

"Like Empedokles, Anaxagoras required some external cause to produce motion in the mixture. Body, Parmenides had shown, would never move itself... Anaxagoras called the cause of motion... . ...[T]his ...made Aristotle say that he "stood out like a sober man from the random talkers that had preceded him," and he has often been credited with the introduction of the spiritual into philosophy. ...[D]isappointment [was] expressed ...by Plato and Aristotle as to the way in which Anaxagoras worked out the theory ... Plato makes Sokrates say: "I once heard a man reading a book... of Anaxagoras... saying it was Mind that ordered the world and was the cause of all things. I was delighted... and... thought he... was right. ...But my extravagant expectations were all dashed... when I... found... the man made no use of Mind... He ascribed no causal power... to it in the ordering of things, but to airs, and aethers, and waters, and a host of other strange things." Aristotle... says: "Anaxagoras uses Mind as a ' to account for the formation of the world ; and whenever he is at a loss to explain why anything necessarily is, he drags it in. But in other cases he makes anything rather than Mind the cause." These utterances... suggest... Nous of Anaxagoras did not... stand on a higher level than... Love and Strife of Empedokles..."

"The system of Anaxagoras, like that of Empedokles, aimed at reconciling the Eleatic doctrine that corporeal substance is unchangeable with... a world which... presents the appearance of coming into being and passing away. The conclusions of Parmenides are... accepted and restated. Nothing can be added to all things; for there cannot be more than all, and all is always equal (fr. 5). Nor can anything pass away. What men commonly call coming into being and passing away is... mixture and separation (fr. 17). This... reads almost like a prose paraphrase of Empedokles (fr. 9); and it is... probable... Anaxagoras derived his theory... from his younger contemporary, whose poem was most likely published before his own treatise."

"Shortly before the ... ...enemies of Perikles began ...attacks upon him through his friends. Pheidias was the first to suffer, and Anaxagoras... next. ...[H]e was an object of special hatred to the religious party ...even though the charge ...against him does not suggest ...he went out of his way to hurt their susceptibilities. The details of the trial are somewhat obscure... [F]irst ...was ...a psephism by —the same whom Aristophanes laughs at in The Birds—enacting that an impeachment should be brought against those who did not practise religion, and taught theories about "the things on high." ...[A]t the actual trial ... authorities give ... conflicting accounts. ...[F]rom Plato ...the accusation was ...that Anaxagoras taught the sun was a red-hot stone, and the moon earth; ...[H]e ...did hold these views ...[H]e was got out of prison and sent away by Perikles."

""There is a portion of everything in everything except , and there are some things in which there is Nous also" (fr. 11). In these words Anaxagoras laid down the distinction between animate and inanimate things. ...[T]he same Nous ..."has power over," ...[i.e.,] sets in motion, all things that have life ...(fr. 12). ...The Nous was the same, but it had more opportunities in one body than another. Man was the wisest... not because he had... better... Nous, but... because he had hands. ...Parmenides ...had ...made the thought of men depend upon ...their limbs."

"The cosmology of Anaxagoras is clearly based upon that of Anaximenes... Theophrastos... [states] that Anaxagoras had belonged to the school of Anaximenes. The floating on the air, the dark bodies below the moon, the explanation of the solstices and the "turnings" of the moon by the resistance of air, the explanations given of wind and of thunder and lightning, are all derived from the earlier inquirer."

"Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to take up his abode at Athens."

"Alexander of Aitolia... referred to Euripides as the "nursling of brave Anaxagoras." ...The famous fragment on the blessedness of the scientific life might just as well refer to any other cosmologist as to Anaxagoras, and ...suggests ...a thinker ...more primitive ...[T]here is one fragment which distinctly expounds the central thought of Anaxagoras ...We may conclude ...that Euripides knew the philosopher and his views ..."

"Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate."

"The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be — this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable."

"You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true warranty."

"For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be."

"It is indifferent to me where I am to begin, for there shall I return again."

"Never will this prevail, that the things that are not are — bar your thought from this road of inquiry."

"Do not let habit, born from experience, force you along this road, directing aimless eye and echoing ear and tongue; but judge by reason the much contested proof which I have spoken."

"Parmenides... tells us... that there is no truth at all in the theory which he expounds, and he gives it merely as the belief of "mortals." ...[T]he beliefs in question are called "the opinions of mortals" simply because the speaker is a goddess. ..Parmenides forbids two ways of research, and... the second... must be the system of Herakleitos. We should.... expect... the other way... is the... contemporary... Pythagorean [school]. ...[T]here are Pythagorean ideas in the Second Part of the poem ...Parmenides said ...there are really only two ways ...and that the attempt of Herakleitos to combine them was futile. ...[H]e ...put into hexameters a view which he believed to be false."

"[Aristotle] was... aware that Parmenides did not admit the existence of "not being"... but... call[ed] the cosmology of the Second Part of the poem that of Parmenides. His Hearers would understand at once in what sense this was meant."

"The... Neoplatonists... especially Simplicius... regarded the Way of Truth as an account of the intelligible world, and the Way of Opinion as a description of the sensible. ...[T]his is... an anachronism..."

"The appearances of multiplicity and motion, empty space and time, are illusions."

"[E]mpty space is nothing, nothing cannot be thought, and therefore cannot exist. What is, never came into being, nor is anything going to come into being in the future. "Is it or is it not?" If it is, then it is now, all at once."

"He goes on to develop all the consequences of the admission that it is. It must be uncreated and indestructible. It cannot have arisen out of nothing; for there is no such thing as nothing. Nor can it have arisen from something; for there is no room for anything but itself."

"Plato... says that Parmenides held "all things were one, and that the one remains at rest in itself, having no place in which to move.""

"[T]he primary substance of which the early cosmologists were in search has now become a... "thing in itself." It never... lost this character again. ...[T]he elements of Empedokles, the... "homoeomeries" of Anaxagoras... the atoms of Leukippos and Demokritos, is just the Parmenidean "being." ...[A]ll materialism depends on his view of reality."

"Parmenides was... the first philosopher to expound his system in metrical language. ...[T]he only Greeks who ...wrote philosophy in verse were ...Parmenides and Empedokles; for Xenophanes was not primarily a philosopher... The fragments of Parmenides are preserved for the most part by Simplicius..."

"[P]ossibly... Parmenides believed in a "philosophic life" (§ 35), and... got the idea from the Pythagoreans; but there is very little trace... of his having been... affected by the religious side of Pythagoreanism. ...[T]here are traces of Orphic ideas in the poem ...Parmenides was a western Hellene, and he had probably been a Pythagorean, so it is not a little remarkable that he should be so free from the common tendency of his age and country. ...[L]ike most of the older philosophers, he took part in politics; and recorded that he legislated for his native city. Others add that the magistrates of Elea made the citizens swear every year to abide by the laws which Parmenides had given them."

"In the First Part of his poem... Parmenides [is] chiefly interested to prove... it is; but it is not... obvious... what it is... that is. He says simply, What is, is. ...[W]e are accustomed to ...distinctions between ...kinds and degrees of reality, and we do not see which ...is meant. Such distinctions... were... unknown in those days. "That which is," with Parmenides, is primarily... matter or body; only it is not matter ...distinguished from anything else. It is... spatially extended; for it is... spoken of as a (fr. 8, 40). ...Aristotle tells us ...Parmenides believed in none but a sensible reality, which ...includes any ...perceived if the senses were more perfect ..."

"The truth is, that these writings of mine were meant to protect the arguments of Parmenides against those who make fun of him and seek to show the many ridiculous and contradictory results which they suppose to follow from the affirmation of the one. My answer is addressed to the partisans of the many, whose attack I return with interest by retorting upon them that their hypothesis of the being of many, if carried out, appears to be still more ridiculous than the hypothesis of the being of one."

"Followers of Parmenides worked themselves into logical knots and mystic raptures over the rather blatant contradiction between point five and everyday experience."

"Aristotle... [i]n the de Caelo... lays it down that Parmenides was driven to take up the position that the One was immovable... because no one... yet imagined... any reality other than sensible reality."

"That which is, is ...it cannot be more or less. There is... as much of it in one place as in another... a continuous, indivisible plenum. From this it follows... that it must be immovable... [for] it must move into an empty space, and there is no empty space. ...For the same reason, it must be finite, and can have nothing beyond it. It is complete in itself, and has no need to stretch out indefinitely into an empty space that does not exist. ...It is equally real in every direction ...the ...the only form ...Any other would ...[have distinguishable] direction... [T]his sphere cannot ...move round its ...axis; for there is nothing outside ...[to] reference..."

"What... was the step that placed the Ionian cosmologists... above the [] level of the Maoris? ...[T]he real advance made by the scientific men of Miletos was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was, when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now. The great principle which underlies all their thinking, though it is first put into words by Parmenides, is that Nothing comes into being out of nothing, and nothing passes away into nothing. They saw, however, that particular things were always coming into being and passing away again, and from this it followed that their existence was no true or stable one. The only things that were real and eternal were the original matter which passed through all these changes and the motion which gave rise to them, to which was... added that law of proportion or compensation..."

"[T]he Peripatetic tradition was that Parmenides, in the Second Part of the poem, meant to give the belief of "the many." This is how Theophrastos put the matter... Alexander seems to have spoken of the cosmology as something... Parmenides... regarded as wholly false."

"Parmenides does not say a word about "Being" anywhere. The assertion that it is...amounts to ...the universe is a plenum; and ...there is no ...empty space ...From this it follows that there can be no such thing as motion. Instead of endowing the One with an impulse to change, as Herakleitos... Parmenides dismissed change as an illusion. He showed... if you take the One seriously you are bound to deny everything else. All previous solutions... had missed the point."

"[H]e had been a Pythagorean ...and ...the poem is a renunciation of his former beliefs. ...The goddess tells him ...he must learn of those beliefs also "how men ought to have judged that the things which seem to them really are." ...He is to learn these beliefs "in order that no opinion of mortals may ever get the better of him" (fr. 8, 61). ...[T]he Pythagorean system ...was handed down by oral tradition ...Parmenides was founding a dissident school, and it was ...necessary ...to instruct ...disciples in the system ...to oppose. ...[T]hey could not reject it intelligently without a knowledge of it, and this Parmenides had to supply ..."

"The path of speech (mythos odoio) (by Parmenides) contains within itself the path of day and that of night. It is no coincidence that Parmenides' poem comprises two parts. What exactly the second part contains and why it is so is an ancient philological and exegetical problem that we will not address here and which Plato already denounced in its ambiguity. In fact, it is not possible to separate being and speech without identifying them, and it is not possible to identify them without, ipso facto, separating them. The “simulation” (the simul) is immediate and structural. Human beings are simulators precisely because they are beings of truth. They cannot tell the truth without lying and vice versa. In this sense, they are beings of mediation, beings that stand in the middle, as you happily recall, that is, beings that ‘work’ to translate immediate experience into knowledge, or into a transferential process. God and nature do not work, but human beings do, first and foremost in naming the fruit of sexuality; it then places humans in the relational milieu of parents and children, brothers and sisters, offered, either really or symbolically, in sacrifice to God, that is, to the community of speakers. [...] The 20th century cannot exist without Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis cannot exist without philosophy, at least in my opinion."

"To prevent nothingness from being, Parmenides asserts that things are nothing. Parmenides, who first appears on the path of Day, which runs far from the path that the West has travelled, takes the first step along the path of Night in the West, the path along which things are thought and experienced as nothing. Parmenides is the tragic sower who sows both the seed of truth and the seed of Madness. (p. 77)"

"One of Parmenides' merits is to have been the first philosopher who strove to handle general concepts like "being", "not-being", "knowing", "unity", "identity", in their systematic connection."

"The position of Parmenides is unique because it is also the point of greatest contact with the East.[...] Parmenides' radical solution is this: becoming no longer threatens, it cannot be harmful because it does not exist. [...] Everything that is distressing, terrible and horrendous in the world is illusion; this is the meaning of Parmenides' “'doxa”'. Well, this is also the path taken by the East: the “”Vedas“”, the “”Upanishads“”, the Buddhist revival of Brahmanism are all great themes that converge on this point: man is unhappy because he does not know he is happy, because he does not know that pain is outside him, and that he is a pure gaze that is not contaminated by the pain that passes before him, just as the mirror is not contaminated by the image reflected in it."

"If I accede to Parmenides there is nothing left but the One; if I accede to Zeno, not even the One is left."

"The history of the essence of nihilism (i.e., the belief that being is nothing) begins with Parmenides, who also affirms the eternity of Being and therefore the impossibility that it, in becoming, is not, i.e., is nothing. It is with Parmenides that the separation of beings from Being begins."

"The philosophy of Parmenides is a strange blend of mysticism and logic. It is mysticism, for its goal is not the gradual and cumulative correction of empirical knowledge, but deliverance from it through the instantaneous and absolute grasp of "immovable" truth. This is not the way of techne, but the way of revelation: it lies "beyond the path of men" (B. 1.27). Yet this revelation is itself addressed to man's reason and must be judged by reason. Its core is pure logic: a rigorous venture in deductive thinking, the first of its kind in European thought. This kind of thinking could be used against the world of the senses … This projection of the logic of Being upon the alien world of Becoming was Parmenides' most important single contribution to the history of thought, though it is seldom recognized as such. Without it, his doctrine of Being could have remained a speculative curiosity. With it, he laid the foundations for the greatest achievement of the scientific imagination of Greece, the atomic hypothesis."

"The great novelty in the poem of Parmenides is the method of argument. He... asks what is the common of all the views... and he finds... this is the existence of what is not. ...[C]an [this] be thought ...it cannot. If you think... you must think of something. Therefore there is no nothing. Philosophy had not yet learned to make the admission that a thing might be unthinkable and nevertheless exist. Only that can be which can be thought (fr. 5); for thought exists for the sake of what is (fr. 8, 34). ...[I]f we ... allow nothing but what we can understand, we come into direct conflict with the evidence of our senses, ...a world of change and decay. So much the worse for the senses, says Parmenides."

"What-is was not generated from what-is-not, because what-is-not cannot give rise to anything in addition to itself. This is the first enunciation of the principle "out of nothing, nothing comes to be,"? which was implicit in earlier Greek thought even as far back as Hesiod and which afterwards, because of Parmenides, became a touchstone for subsequent Greek cosmogonies. These arguments show that coming to be from what-is-not is impossible, which is... relevant in the first stage of a cosmogony. The arguments say nothing of more familiar cases of coming to be, which can be described in terms of changes among already existing things."

"I walked on to the next corner, sat on a bench at a bus stop, and read in my new book about Heraclitus. All things flow like a river, he said; nothing abides. Parmenides, on the other hand, believed that nothing ever changed, it only seemed so. Both views appealed to me."

"As Parmenides categorically threw out all observation with the senses, so this student of philosophy is inclined to throw out Parmenides as a complete waste of time! His static theories denying motion and change were in direct antithesis to the Kinetic metaphysics of Heracleitus, and his depressing monism was later refuted by the atomists Democritus and Leucippus. In a nutshell; in a word; Parmenides is Pah! — and definitely not a philosopher to take to bed with you on a long winter evening! … Personally speaking the whole thing makes me shudder — although I do acknowledge that paradoxes and riddles are very popular with the average thirteen-year-old school boy. Zeno however, impressed his dialectical ability on Socrates, who then began turning it loose on the average citizen in the Agora (market-place) and in consequence made himself most unpopular. I only think that it is a pity that when they asked Socrates to drink the hemlock in 399 B.C., they didn' t include Zeno and Parmenides in the invitation."

"What is clear is that Parmenides is making a conscious attempt at some kind of a new start. Like Descartes, he is trying to find an unassailable starting-point on which something further can be built. This search is understandable, given the intellectual situation of the time. The principles of the Milesians had yielded no one clearly true system, but a number of rival ones — in itself a scandal. Heraclitus had made the whole of cosmology suspect by revealing deep-seated contradictions at its heart. In the background, the Pythagoreans were directly or indirectly stimulating new lines of thought and using them, perhaps, for their own mysterious purposes."

"Greek philosophy returned for some time to the concept of the One in the teachings of Parmenides... His most important contribution... was, perhaps, that he introduced a purely logical argument into metaphysics. "One cannot know what is not—that is impossible—nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be." Therefore, only the One is, and there is no becoming or passing away. Parmenides denied the existence of empty space for logical reasons. Since all change requires empty space... he dismissed change as an illusion."

"Of the philosophers, Thales is vaguely reported to have taught that souls are immortal. But neither he nor his immediate successors... believed in the immortality of particular souls... This doctrine belongs to the Orphic tradition. In Heracleitus and Parmenides we find the two doctrines of immortality... implicit in mysticism, separated... for the first time. Heracleitus is the champion of the Dionysiac... life and death... in an unending cycle; Parmenides, under Orphic influence, teaches... Soul has fallen from... light and reality to the dark and unreal... bodily existence. This, however, is... only 'the way of opinion'... [Parmenides] feels.... that... substantiality... is not so easily got rid of. But he will not give up... eternal substance. The most interesting fragment of Parmenides... seems to enunciate, for the first time in Greek thought, the mystical doctrine of eternity as a timeless Now, as opposed to the popular... unending succession. 'There remains then only to give an account of one way—that real Being exists. Many signs... showing... it is unborn, indestructible, entire, unique, unshakable, and unending. It never was, and it never will be, since it is all together present in the Now, one and indivisible.' Empedocles... repudiates... Parmenides, probably on the ground that he reduces the world of time and change to nullity... thus leaves no pathway from appearance to reality. His doctrine of the soul’s exile and wanderings is... Orphic doctrine, which Pindar also gives... in the second Olympian Ode. The Soul sins by separating itself from God... from love and a choice of ' strife ’ in the place of harmony. The immortal Soul is... love and strife blended; the body... only an 'alien garment'... perishes at death. ...Empedocles describes the Soul as a ratio, or harmony ...the complex of...'strife'... bound... by the principle of unity...'love'...Parmenides ...may be ...rejects the Pytdhagorean doctrines ...finds truth in static materialism."