ELEATICISM

one of the principal schools of ancient Pre-Socratic philosophy, so called from its seat in the Greek colony of Elea (or Velia) in southern Italy. This school, which flourished in the 5th century BC, was distinguished by its radical monism; i.e., its doctrine of the One, according to which all that exists (or is really true) is a static plenum of Being as such, and nothing exists that stands either in contrast or in contradiction to Being. Thus, all differentiation, motion, and change must be illusory. This monism is also reflected in its view that existence, thought, and expression coalesce into one. The sources for the study of Eleaticism are both archaeological and literary. Archaeologists have ascertained that, at the time of Parmenides, the Rationalist who founded the school, Elea was a large town with many temples, a harbour, and a girdle of walls several miles long. They have also unearthed a site presumed to be that of the medical school that Parmenides founded and an inscription bearing Parmenides' name. The literary sources consist of fragments preserved by later classical authors19 from Parmenides, four from his pupil Zeno, renowned for his paradoxes of motion, and 10 from another pupil, Melissus, an admiral of Samosof which all but three from Parmenides and two from Melissus are 10 lines or less in length. The interpretation is also affected by the weight of scholarly opinion that now holds (as against Karl Reinhardt, an early 20th-century philologist and historian of philosophy) that Parmenides reacted to Heracleitus and not vice versa. Moreover, the biases of the citing authors must be weighed. Heracleitans and Parmenideans of the second generation, for example, saw their masters, simplistically, only as the prophets of movement and immobility; and the ancient Skeptic Sextus Empiricus distorted Parmenides' thinking into problems of epistemology (theory of knowledge), because this is what his Skeptical eye saw in his writings. (from Elea, or Velia, a Greek colony in southern Italy), one of the principal schools of ancient Pre-Socratic philosophy, distinguished by its radical monism, according to which all that is really true is a static plenum of Being and nothing exists that stands either in contrast or in contradiction to it; and by its stress on the coalescence of existence, thought, and expression. As a result of Aristotle's systematizing, Xenophanes of Colophon has often been counted as the founder of the Eleatic school; but its chief tenets undoubtedly appear first in Parmenides. Zeno of Elea was the pupil of Parmenides; and Melissus was the third and last leader of the school. A summary of certain features in Parmenides' doctrine will explain its outstanding importance to philosophy. It argues that reality is one undifferentiated whole; the things and their changes that we observe through our senses are mere appearances or names. He claimed that Being is one (Greek hen) and unique and that it is continuous, indivisible, and all that there is or ever will be (the Eleatic One). Aristotle further elaborated Parmenides' argument to assert that Being must be all there issince other than Being there is only Not-Beingand Not-Being cannot divide Being from Being. It follows, therefore, that Being is whole, continuous, and not divisible, since it is all alike. In opposition to the Ionian natural philosophers who accepted the reality of change but looked for material stuff underlying it, Parmenides' position was reached by an abstract, logical, or generalized analysis of what we mean by to be. He was therefore correctly regarded as the founder of metaphysics. His use of the law of contradiction meant the introduction of logic as the prime method of philosophy. Melissus defended him along the same lines, while Zeno's work forms a complement by defending him negatively or indirectly, through a reductio ad absurdum of his opponents' position. With Zeno, however, the analysis focuses less on Being than on the coextensive term Unity. He may have intended to deal with the pluralism of Pythagoreans, whose materialization of numbers made them specially aware that plurality implied units. Here was the weak point of Eleaticism, and it was noticed by Gorgias and by Plato: the absurdities demonstrated in the alleged units of the pluralists had only to be turned against the unitary reality of the Eleatics. By Plato's time the heirs of Zeno were so-called Megarian thinkers, who concentrated on logical puzzles involved in the notions of predication, contradiction, possibility, and motion; we can see how they compelled Plato to attend to purely logical matters in the Euthydemus, Parmenides, and Sophist. The influence of the Eleatic school was due, in fact, to the very generality of its analysis. Melissus' remark, that if there were a many these would have to be like the Eleatic One and not as they appear, was acceptable to Democritus and to Plato alike. The properties of the atom were almost certainly suggested by those of the one. The Eleatic or monistic strand in Plato is conspicuous in the Neoplatonists and, through their medium, was to be consciously woven by G.W.F. Hegel into his objective idealism. Additional reading The main edition of the fragments of the Eleatic, as of all the Pre-Socratic, philosophers is still Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903; 11th ed. rev. by Walther Kranz, 3 vol., 1964), which is a critical edition of the Greek fragments with German translations; for English translations see Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1948, reprinted 1962); Pilo Albertelli, Gli Eleati: testimonianze e frammenti (1939), is a good Italian translation with commentary. Much of the best material on Eleaticism is in general works on ancient Greek or Pre-Socratic philosophy. The most comprehensive treatment is in Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, 67th ed., 3 vol., ed. by W. Nestle (192023); in the revised Italian trans. of Zeller, ed. with extensive additions by Roldolfo Mondolfo, the portion on the Eleatic school by Giovanni Reale (1967) occupies the whole 3rd volume of the 1st section and contains a good selected bibliography; an English translation of Zeller is entitled A History of Greek Philosophy, from the Earliest Period to the Time of Socrates, 2 vol. (1881). See also John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (1930, reprinted 1963); Geoffrey Kirk and John E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 263306 (1957); W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 2 (1965); and Guido Calogero, Storia della logica antica, vol. 1, pp. 109208 (1967).