Parmenides' homepage

Parmenides

Parmenides was a native and resident of the Greek colony of Elea, on the western coast of Italy.  (Hence, he and his philosophical associates are often referred to as the Eleatics, or as constituting the so-called Eleatic "school" of philosophy.)  He was active philosophically about a generation after Heraclitus, with whose work he seems to have been familiar:   there are brief
allusions to some of Heraclitus's views in Parmenides' work.  Together, Heraclitus and Parmenides are widely regarded as the two greatest Greek philosophical predecessors of Socrates; and each of them continued to have an enormous influence on subsequent Greek philosophy during the ancient period.

Parmenides held that all the cosmos is, in a radical sense, One, and that may be why it is often difficult, in images that picture Parmenides, to make him out as separate from the background -- as in the image above, which is our best portrait of this handsome Greek philosopher.

Click here for a version of Parmenides' work, On Nature, in print easier to read than the Greek Coursepack version (pp. 37-40).  The editor of this version (acknowledged at the close), has also put the passages in a different order, while preserving the numbers found in the Coursepack.