Everything about The Eleatic totally explained
The
Eleatics were a school of
pre-Socratic philosophers at
Elea, a Greek colony in
Campania,
Italy. The group was founded in the early fifth century BCE by
Parmenides. Other members of the school included
Zeno of Elea and
Melissus of Samos.
Xenophanes is sometimes included in the list, though there's some dispute over this.
History
The school took its name from Elea, a Greek city of lower Italy, the home of its chief exponents, Parmenides and Zeno. Its foundation is often attributed to Xenophanes of Colophon, but, although there's much in his speculations which formed part of the later Eleatic doctrine, it's probably more correct to regard Parmenides as the founder of the school.
Xenophanes espoused a belief that "God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or in mind." [Zeller,Vorsokrastische Philosophie, p. 530, n. 3.] Parmenides developed some of Xenophanes's
metaphysical ideas. Subsequently, the school debated the possibility of
motion and other such fundamental questions. The work of the school was influential upon
Platonic metaphysics.
Philosophy
The Eleatics rejected the
epistemological validity of sense experience, and instead took logical standards of clarity and necessity to be the criteria of
truth. Of the members, Parmenides and Melissus built arguments starting from indubitably sound premises. Zeno, on the other hand, primarily employed the
reductio ad absurdum, attempting to destroy the arguments of others by showing their premises led to contradictions (
Zeno's paradoxes).
The main doctrines of the Eleatics were evolved in opposition to the theories of the early
physicalist philosophers, who explained all existence in terms of primary
matter, and to the theory of
Heraclitus, which declared that all existence may be summed up as perpetual change. The Eleatics maintained that the true explanation of things lies in the conception of a universal
unity of being. According to their doctrine, the
senses can't cognize this unity, because their reports are inconsistent; it's by thought alone that we can pass beyond the false appearances of sense and arrive at the
knowledge of being, at the fundamental truth that the All is One. Furthermore, there can be no
creation, for being can't come from
non-being, because a thing can't arise from that which is different from it. They argued that errors on this point commonly arise from the ambiguous use of the verb to be, which may imply existence or be merely the
copula which connects
subject and
predicate.
Though the conclusions of the Eleatics were rejected by the later
Presocratics and
Aristotle, their arguments were taken seriously, and they're generally credited with improving the standards of discourse and argument in their time. Their influence was likewise longlasting --
Gorgias, a
Sophist, argued in the style of the Eleatics in his work "On Nature or What Is Not," and
Plato acknowledged them in the
Parmenides, the
Sophist and the
Politicus. Furthermore, much of the later philosophy of the ancient period borrowed from the methods and principles of the Eleatics.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Eleatic'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://eleatics.totallyexplained.com">Eleatics Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
