Led by Parmenides
About this course
The second module of the Metaphysics paper confronts the problem that every later metaphysics tries to solve: how is change so much as possible? It is led by Parmenides of Elea, who pressed the question to its limit and concluded that change cannot happen at all.
Where Heraclitus had taught that reality is flux — that everything flows, that you cannot step twice into the same river, that the world is the unity and strife of opposites — Parmenides reasons from one austere principle: what-is-not cannot be thought or spoken, so nothing can come from it or pass into it. From this he derives a single, ungenerated, undivided, motionless Being, and consigns the whole world of coming-to-be and plurality to the realm of mortal illusion. His pupil Zeno defended the thesis with the famous paradoxes of motion; his successors — Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomists — tried to win back the changing world while honouring his ban on coming-from-nothing.
The student leaves able to reconstruct the Eleatic argument in full, to weigh it against Heraclitean flux, to handle Zeno's paradoxes, and to see how the problem of change sets up Aristotle's answer in the next module. They read the surviving fragments directly.
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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.