PHIL 110 · Metaphysics — Change and the One and the Many

Led by Parmenides

The second module of the Cambridge Part IA Metaphysics paper, led by Parmenides — the philosopher who argued that change is impossible. Against Heraclitus, for whom reality is flux, Parmenides reasons from a single principle (what-is-not cannot be) to a single, eternal, changeless Being, and dismisses the world of many moving things as illusion. The student follows the argument through Zeno's paradoxes and the pluralists' rescue, ending with the problem of change that drives the rest of the paper.

1. Module 2 ○ Open

   Change and the One and the Many: The Eleatic Challenge

   Led by Parmenides

   The question

   Can anything come into being, change, or pass away? Common sense says obviously yes; Parmenides argues, from a single principle, that the answer is no — and that the whole world of change and plurality is an illusion of the senses. The module sets his monism against Heraclitus's opposed vision of reality as ceaseless flux, follows Parmenides' reasoning from the two roads of inquiry through the impossibility of not-being to the signs of unchanging Being, tests it against Zeno's paradoxes of motion, and traces how the later pluralists tried to rescue the changing world while conceding that nothing can come from nothing — the problem that the rest of the paper exists to solve.

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