Parmenides' Weg

Parmenides is not a philosopher in the present-day sense of the word. He is so little a philosopher, that, in order to found classical philosophy, Plato has to commit parricide. Indeed Parmenides is rather the thinker of an epoch-making transition, the cultural link between pre-philosophical (maybe even Eastern) wisdom on the one hand and post-Socratic, Western philosophy on the other. The aim of this study is to reconstruct as completely as possible the thought of Parmenides in order to highlight both the internal unity and the originality of his doctrine.

Indeed, the innovative theorisation of Being by the Eleatic author in part one of his poem is matched in part two by physics based on the same principle: a real 'pars construens' which has exercised a significant influence on the immediately following philosophers of 'physis'. One and the same vision, i. e. the logical-ontological impossibility and the gnoseological unthinkability of the existence of any kind of Non-Being, is in fact the foundation of a dualistic conception of the world. Behind the truthlike appearance of Doxa (which has, nevertheless, its own way of existing in time and space), there is the true Being existing beyond time. This was a momentuous doctrine which ever since has never ceased contributing to the main trends of Western metaphysical tradition.

In an Appendix the author examines the likelihood of contacts between early Indian thought (as represented by the Rig-Veda and the first Upanishads) and the doctrine of Parmenides.