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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
The main argument in Parmenides’ didactic poem begins with these remarks by the unnamed goddess who delivers the revelation (B2 in Diels-Kranz Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker):
Come now and I shall tell you, and you listen to the account and carry it forth, which routes of inquiry (ơδοί…διζησιος , B2.2) alone are for knowing: the one (μέν, B2.3), that (…) is and that it is not possible (for …) not to be ὅπως ἔστιν τε ϰαὶ ὼς οὐϰ ἔστι μὴ είναι, B2.3) is the course of Persuasion, for it attends truth; the other ἠδ; B2.5 that (…) is not and that it is right (for …) not to be (ὡς οὐϰ ἔστιυ τε ϰαὶ ὡς χρεών ἐστι μὴ εἶναι, B2.5) that one I mark for you as being a byway from which no tidings ever come (παναπευθέα ἔμμεν άταρπόυ, B2.6) For you could neither come to know (Υυοίμς, aorist, B2.7) the thing itself which is not (τό Υε μὴ έόυ), for it cannot be consummated (οὐ Υὰρ ἀνυστόυ), nor could you point it out (φράσαις, aorist, B2.8).
1 See Owen, G. E. L., “Eieatic Questions,” Classical Quarterly, N.S. 10 (1960) 84- 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; repr. in Allen, R. E. and Furley, David J., Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, Vol. II: Eleatics and Pluralists (London, 1975), pp. 48-81;Google ScholarFurth, Montgomery, “Elements of Eleatic Ontology,” journal of the History of Philosophy, 6 (1968), 111-32Google Scholar; repr. in Mourelatos, A. P. D., ed., The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays(Garden City, N.Y., 1974), pp. 241-70Google Scholar; Kahn, Charles H., “The Thesis of Parmenides,” The Review of Metaphysics, 22 (1969). 700-24Google Scholar; Furley, David J., “Notes on Parmenides,” in Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos, Phronesis, suppl. vol. 1 (Assen and New York, 1973), pp. 1-15;Google Scholar and now Robinson, T. M., “Parmenides on Ascertainment of the Real.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1975). 623-33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 The Route of Parmenides (New Haven and London, 1970). pp. 51-55. 70. 269- 76; “Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Naive Metaphysics of Things,” in Exegesis and Argument, pp. 40-46; “Comments on ‘The Thesis of Parmenides,’ “ The Review of Metaphysics, 22 (1969), 742-44.
3 A similar construction of the Parmenidean esti had been proposed in the 1930's by Calogero, Guido: see Studi suill’ Eleatismo (Rome, 1932), pp. 16Google Scholar ff.; trans. Studien über den Eleatismus (Darmstadt, 1970). pp. 17 If. Calogero. however, went on to interpret Parmenides’ argument as illicitly drawing on a confusion of the “is” of predication with the “is” of existence. Neither I nor the scholars referred to in note 1 above favor this elaboration of Calogero's otherwise path-breaking proposal.
I should make it clear at the start that the notation” —is— or “xis F” is valid only in the English translation. Had the ancient Greeks devised a notation with blank marks or letters as place holders to record the frame of a simple copulative sentence. they would probably have written “— — esti.” or “x Ф esti,” since not only is this by far the most common pattern of word order in copulative clauses, but Ф esti is also nearly universal as word order pattern for clauses in which the subject is not expressed. See Kahn, Charles H., The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek. Foundations of Language, suppl. ser. vol. 16 (Dordrecht and Boston, 1973). pp. 427-32.Google Scholar Some readers of Parmenides, who are convinced as I am that the goddess deliberately suppresses the subject of esti, nevertheless balk at the idea that she should have suppressed the predicate complement as well. It might allay their qualms to note that it is the English transcription which gives the misleading impression that two distinct elisions are postulated, one before and one after the esti.
4 See Verb ‘Be', ch. 7; cf. his “The Greek Verb ‘to be’ and the Concept of Being,” foundations of Language, 2 (1966), 245-65; “On the Theory of the Verb ‘to be,’ “ in Munitz, M. K., ed., Logic and Ontology(New York, 1973), pp. 1-20Google Scholar; “The Thesis of Parmenides,” pp. 700-24. My remarks in this paragraph of the text are intended, in part, to correct what I said in Route, pp. 48-49, 52, 269-76 and in “Comments,” pp. 740 ff.
5 “Elements,” p. 112.
6 Verb ‘Be·. p. 105.
7 Ibid., pp. 247, 249; cf. 164-67, 254-55.
8 Kahn shows that the copulative component of the esti in these examples can be made clear through a transformational analysis into the underlying (depth structure) kernels: ibid., pp. 254, 256.
9 See “Thesis,” p. 711, Verb ‘Be', pp. 333-42.
10 All of the scholars referred to in n. 1 above adhere to this view.
11 For the translation “point out,” see my note” φράςω and its Derivatives in Parmenides,” Classical Philology, 40 (1965), 261-62.
12 Rhet. III.6.1408a2-4.
13 A certain perennial commonplace is also relevant and suggestive here. Montaigne in his Essais, Bk. II, ch. 9: “Mais le revers de Ia vérité a cent mille figures et un champ indefiny. les Phythagoriens font le bien certain et finy, le mal infiny et incertain. Mille routtes desvoient du blanc [ = miss the target], une y va” (ed. Pierre Villey [Paris, 1965], p. 37). I am indebted for this reference to Mr. Scott Austin.
14 Cf. “Naive Metaphysics,” pp. 16 ff.
15 Ibid., pp. 31-40.
16 Ibid, pp. 17-30.
17 Verb ‘Be', p. 36; cf. p. 108 and no. 29, 249 and n. 22, 299 n. 61.
18 This asymmetry I sought to capture in Route by characterizing the Parmenidean “is” as conveying “speculative predication” (p. 57, and ch. 2 passim). I am now dissatisfied not just with that piece of terminology but with the description I gave there of the hybrid copula/identity use. As paradigms of the use I postulated Milesian contexts of the form “It is water,” “It is air“― a maneuver that now strikes me as question-begging. Moreover, the translation “really is” for esti, which the account in terms of “speculative predication” tended to suggest, had the effect of projecting artificial complexities into the analysis of the argument in “Truth.“
19 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Prototractatus: An Early Version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. by McGuinness, B.F.et al. (London, 1971), pp. 236-37.Google Scholar See also Anscombe, G. E. M., “Retractation,” Analysis, 26 (1965), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strawson, P. F., “The Asymmetry of Subjects and Predicates,” in Kiefer, Howard E. and Munitz, Milson K., Language, Belief and Metaphysics (Albany, N.Y., 1970). pp. 69-86Google Scholar; cf. “Naive Metaphysics,” p. 43.
20 In “Notes” Furley states this objection to my account (in Route): [Parmenides] appears to insist on the equivalence of mē eon and mēden, and to use this equivalence in his refutation. But mēden cannot plausibly be taken to mean ‘nothing determinate,’ at least in the opening moves of the argument” (p. 12). By “opening moves” Furley has in mind frr. B3 and B6.1-2. It is only in interpretations that have the goddess concerned about problems of reference (see n. 1) that these notoriously ambiguous lines make an indispensable contribution to the “opening moves of the argument.” In the interpretation offered here the argument is complete at the end of B2; and there the term is mē eon, not mēden. The assimilation of the one term to the other I would not deny-in Parmenides, or indeed in many contexts of fifth and fourth-century Greek thought. But Greek mēden, like English “nothing,“ is an ambiguous term. It might be glossed as “what does not exist.” But it can also be glossed as “what is not anything” or “what not-in-any-way is“: cf. Owen, G. E. L., “Plato on Not-Being,” in Vlastos, Gregory, ed., Plato, I: Metaphysics and Epistemology (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), p. 247.Google Scholar This quasi- characterizing sense of mēden and of cognate forms, such as ouden and the personal forms mēdeis and oudeis is well-documented in Greek tragedy and is also attested in earlier contexts, notably Pindar and Homer: see Moorhouse, A. C., “A Use of oudeis and mēdeis,” Classical Quarterly, N.S. 15 (1965), 31–40.Google Scholar Cf. below n. 23.
21 See most recently Borman, Karl, Parmenides: Untersuchungen zu den Fragmenten(Hamburg, 1971), pp. 73–78Google Scholar, 94-96. On the meaning of chrē and cognates, see Route, pp. 277-78.
22 See Moorhouse, A. C., Studies in the Greek Negatives(Cardiff, 1959), pp. 47- 59Google Scholar; Hamilton, Hollister Adelbert, The Negative Compounds in Greek (Baltimore, 1899), pp. 6, 40.Google Scholar
23 See, e.g., Sopholes Electra 164-67 ᾄτεχυος . . . ᾄυμφεντος . . . ᾀυήνυτον ἔχουσα χαχῶν Cf. ibid., 186-89,230-32,813-22, 1181, 1183. Contexts of this sort iliustrate one pattern of ordinary language that perhaps underlies the fallacy which, according to Owen, Plato endeavors to correct in the Sophist, viz., conceiving of “Nothing” or “Not-Being” as “a subject with all the being knocked out of it and so unidentifiable, no subject“ (“Plato on Not-Being,” p. 247).
24 Homer II. 9.63 άφρήτωρ άθ έμιοτος άνέστιος . For an ample list of examples, see Hamilton, pp. 44-45.
25 Cf. Mansfeld, Jaap, Die Offenbarung des Parmenides und die menschliche Welt, Wijsgerige Teksten en Studies, 9 (Assen, 1964), pp. 87Google Scholar, 130-33.
26 “Eine Pseudo-Disjunktion,” as Mansfeld very aptly calls it, ibid., p. 131 and passim.
27 I am happy to acknowledge here my debt to Jaap Mansfeld whose study, cited above (see esp. ch. 3). was the first to give this contrast, between two senses of krisis in “Truth” and in “Doxa,” the clear formulation and emphasis it deserves.
28 See Route, ch. 9, esp. p. 261.
29 The present paper is excerpted, with revisions, from my contribution “Parmenides and the Pre-Sophistic Conception of Non-Being,” offered to the University of Alberta workshop on “Parmenides, Zeno, and their Ancient Critics.” Sponsored by the Canada Council, the workshop was held at Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, November 17-19, 1974. A shorter version of the paper has appeared in Lampas: tijdschrift voor nederlandse classici, 8 (1975). 334-43 [ issue on Voorsocratische filosofie, ed. J. Mansfeld], and is incorporated here with the permission of the publisher, Tjeenk Willink/Noorduijn.
