Chapter 8 Chapter 5 Parmenides

The Greeks did not indulge in the golden mean, neither in their theory nor in their practice.Heraclitus believed that everything is changing; Parmenides countered that nothing is changing. Parmenides was a native of Elea in southern Italy, and its heyday was around the first half of the fifth century BC.According to Plato, Socrates had a meeting with Parmenides when he was young (about 450 BC)--Parmenides was already an old man at that time--and learned from him Learned a lot.Whether this meeting is historical or not, we can at least infer that Plato himself was influenced by the teachings of Parmenides, which is evident from other sources.The philosophers of southern Italy and Sicily were more mystical and religious than the Ionian philosophers.In general, the Ionian philosophers tended to be scientific and skeptical.But mathematics, under the influence of Pythagoras, flourished much more in Magna Graecia than in Ionia; yet mathematics in that age was confused with mysticism.Parmenides was influenced by Pythagoras, but to what extent this influence is entirely conjectural.Parmenides is historically important because he created a form of metaphysical argument that has existed in various forms for most subsequent metaphysicians up to Hegel, and includes Hegel himself included.It is often said that he created logic, but what he really created was metaphysics based on logic.

Parmenides' teaching is expressed in a poem "On Nature".He considered the senses to be deceitful, and dismissed a multitude of sensible things as mere illusions.The only real existence is One.One is infinite and indivisible.It is not the unity of opposites, as Heraclitus said, because there are no opposites.He apparently thought, for example, that "cold" meant only "not hot," and that "dark" meant only "not bright."The One that Parmenides conceives is not God as we conceive; he seems to think of it as material and occupying space, since he says it is spherical.But it is indivisible because its wholeness is omnipresent.

Parmenides divided his teaching into two parts: called respectively "the way of truth" and "the way of opinion".We don't have to worry about the latter.What he said about the way of truth, so far as it survives, is as follows: "You cannot know what does not exist,—that is impossible,—nor can you say it ; for what can be thought is the same as what can be." How then can what exists now be able to exist in the future?In other words, how could it exist?If it existed in the past, it does not exist now; if it existed in the future, it does not exist now either.Therefore, change is eliminated, and there is no transition to be heard. "Things that can be thought are the same as the object of thought; for you can never find a thought without the being that it expresses." The essence of this argument is this: When you think, you must be Think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something.Both thought and language therefore require some kind of object outside themselves.And since you can think or speak of a thing equally at one moment and at another, so whatever can be thought or said must exist at all times.Therefore there can be no change, since change involves the coming into being and passing away of things.

In philosophy, this is the earliest example of inferring the whole world from thought and language.Of course we cannot regard it as valid, but it is well worth seeing what elements of truth it contains. We can express this argument in the following way: If language is not meaningless, then words must mean something, and they generally mean not just other words but something else. a thing that exists, whether we mention it or not.For example, let's say you talked about George Washington.Unless there is a historical person named by that name, the name is (seemingly) meaningless, and sentences containing it are also meaningless.Parmenides argues that not only must George Washington have existed in the past, but in some sense he must still exist now, since we can still use his name meaningfully.This obviously seems wrong, but how do we deal with this kind of argument?

Let us take an imaginary character, say Hamlet.Let's consider this statement: "Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark".In a sense this is true, but not in a naive historical sense.The true statement is: "Shakespeare said that Hamlet was the prince of Denmark", or more plainly: "Shakespeare said that there was a Danish prince named 'Hamlet'".There is no longer any imaginary thing in it.Shakespeare and Denmark and the sound of "Hamlet" are all three real, but the sound of "Hamlet" is not actually a name, because there is actually no one named "Hamlet."If you say "'Hamlet' is the name of an imagined character", this is not strictly true; you should say, "One imagines that 'Hamlet' is the name of a real person".

Hamlet is an imaginary individual, and the unicorn is an imaginary animal.Some of the sentences in which the word kylin occurs are true and some are false, but not directly in either case.Let's look at "a unicorn has one horn" and "a cow has two horns".To prove the latter statement, you have to go and see a cow; it is not enough to say that a certain book says that a cow has two horns.But the evidence that Qilin has a horn can only be found in books, and in fact the correct statement is: "Some books say that there is a one-horned animal called 'Qilin'".All the sayings about unicorns are actually sayings about the word "unicorn", just as all sayings about Hamlet are actually sayings about the word "Hamlet".

But in most cases, it is quite obvious that what we are talking about is not the word, but what the word means.This then brings us back to Parmenides' argument that, if a word can be used significatively, it must mean something rather than nothing, and therefore what the word means must exist in some sense. But what should we say about George Washington?It seems that we have only two choices: one is to say that he still exists; the other is to say that when we use the words "George Washington" we are not actually saying that name that person.Both seem to be a paradox, but the latter seems less difficult, and I shall try to show that there is a sense in which it can be true.

Parmenides held that words have constant meanings; this is in fact the basis of his argument, which he assumes to be unquestionable.However, although dictionaries or encyclopedias give a word what may be said to be an official and socially accepted meaning, no two people have exactly the same thought in their minds when they use the same word. George Washington himself can use his name and the word "I" synonymously.He can perceive his own thoughts as well as the movements of his own body, so he uses the name more fully than anyone else can possibly mean.His friends, too, could perceive the movements of his body and guess his thoughts in his presence; for them the name George Washington still meant something concrete in their own experience.But after Washington's death, they had to substitute memory for perception, and when they used his name, there was a change of mental process involved.For those of us who never knew him, the mental process was different again.We can think of his portrait and say to ourselves: "This is the man".We can think of "the first president of the United States."If we are very ignorant, he may be only "the man called Washington" to us.Whatever the name suggests to us, since we never knew him, it can never be Washington himself, but only something presently present before the senses or memory or thought.This shows the error of Parmenides' argument.This perpetual change in the meaning of a word is overshadowed by the fact that, generally speaking, it has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the proposition in which it appears.If you come up with any true sentence in which the name "George Washington" occurs, it will as a rule still be true when you substitute the words "the first great president of the United States" for it.There are exceptions to this rule.Before Washington was elected, a man could say "I wish George Washington was the first president of the United States," but he would not say "I wish the first president of the United States was the first president of the United States" unless he Have a special feeling.But it is easy to come up with a rule that excludes these exceptions, and in those remaining cases you can use any descriptive phrase that applies only to Washington in place of "George Washington."And only by virtue of these words do we know that we know him.

Parmenides also argues that since we can now know what is usually considered past, it cannot actually be past, but must in some sense exist now.He therefore reasoned that there is no such thing as change.What we say about George Washington resolves this argument.In a sense, it can be said that we have no knowledge of the past.When you recall, the recall occurs in the present, but the recall is not the same thing as the recalled.Recall, however, provides a description of past events, and for most practical purposes it is not necessary to distinguish the description from the thing described. This whole argument shows how easy it is to draw metaphysical conclusions from language, and how the only way to avoid such fallacious inferences is to advance the study of the logical and psychological aspects of language further than most metaphysical What the author has done goes a step further.

Yet I think Parmenides, if he should rise from the dead, and read what I have said, he would think it very superficial.He would ask: "How do you know that your account of Washington refers to a past time? According to yourself, direct inferences must be to existing things; for example, your flashbacks are happening now, not happening. Just when you thought you were remembering. If memory is to be considered a source of knowledge, then the past must be the present. keeping it". I do not want to address this argument now; it requires a discussion of memory, and that is a difficult subject.I present the argument here to remind the reader that philosophical theories, if they are important, can usually always be revived in new form after they have been refuted in their original narrative form.Rebuttals are seldom final; in most cases they are only a prelude to further refinements.

What later philosophy, until very late times, received from Parmenides was not the impossibility of all change—that was too violent a paradox—but the indestructibility of substance. sex. The word "substance" did not appear among his immediate successors, but the concept had appeared in their minds.Substances are conceived of as eternal and unchanging subjects of varying predicates.It has thus become one of the fundamental concepts in philosophy, psychology, physics, and theology, and has remained so for more than two thousand years.I shall say more about this later on.For the moment I just want to point out that I have to mention this in order to be fair to Parmenides' argument without obliterating the obvious factual bias.