Parmenides of Elea c.515-c.445BC
Greek philosopher

Born in Southern Italy, he founded the Eleatic school (which included his pupils Zeno and Melissus). Little is known of his life but he produced a remarkable philosophical treatise, On Nature, written in hexameter verse, of which substantial fragments have survived and which represents a radical departure from the cosmologies of his Ionian predecessors such as Thales and Anaximander. The first part is a sustained deductive argument about the nature of being, which argues for the impossibility of motion, plurality and change. He contrasts this 'way of truth' with the 'way of seeming' in the second part of the poem, which is very obscure but apparently presents a more traditional cosmology. This highly original work set an agenda of problems for the subsequent pre-Socratic philosophers, and in some ways foreshadows the dualism of Plato's metaphysics.

Bibliography: Scott Austin, Parmenides: Being, Bounds and Logic (1986)