Episode 197: Parmenides on What There Is (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 197 is something like what is there? Or what is being? And we read the fragments referred to as On Nature by Parmenides from somewhere around 475 BC. For more information, please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer broadcasting from the Way of Seeming in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:25 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:28 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey at the shores of Mullet Lake, Michigan.

0:31 Peter: And I'm Peter Adamson and I'm in Munich, Germany.

0:34 Mark: Welcome Peter.

0:35 Peter: Thanks for having me on.

0:36 Mark: Famed of the history of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast, which we have just determined has been going almost as long as ours. We're nine and a half years now. And you're in the eighth year, right?

0:48 Peter: Yeah, I'm in my eighth year. I started in 2010 and have produced

0:51 Mark: 400 something like that episodes almost.

0:54 Peter: Yeah.

0:55 Mark: Do you want to say it little about what that project's about, why you got into that before we start with Parmenides here?

0:59 Peter: Oh sure. It's a podcast that comes out every week like clockwork on Sunday mornings, and it's a mix of scripted episodes and interviews, almost always with just one other person. So not a round table discussion like you guys do. So usually I've written a script myself and I'm taking listeners through the entire history of philosophy and it's called Without Any Gaps because I don't leave anything out so I don't skip from major figure to major Figure. So I didn't do Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and then let's say, Augustine, Aquinas.

It took me 100 plus episodes to get to Augustine because I covered all the pre Socratics, lots of works by Plato and Aristotle, Plato and Aristotle's immediate students, all the Hellenistic schools, etc. Etc. Etc. And it also covers non Western philosophical traditions. There's a complete series on ancient Indian philosophy that I did together with Jonardon Ganeri, and at the moment I'm covering Africana philosophy with another co author who is Chike Jeffers. And then we get in other experts for interviews to add another perspective and more detail on some topics.

2:04 Mark: Yes, if folks are looking for something to supplement the Partially Examined Life, I think that your podcast is a very good one for that. I mean it's taking us this many episodes to get around to Parmenides, who is one of the most influential and earliest philosophers that we have, we did do Heraclitus, but that was several years ago at this point, and have done no other Presocratics. Plenty of Plato and a good amount of Aristotle, but other than the Stoics, almost no other ancient figures at all. A few Romans here and there, but yeah, you fill in a lot of the gaps that we have left.

2:33 Peter: Yeah. I mean, mine's chronological, though, so by the same token, you've done lots and lots of modern figures.

2:39 Mark: Yes. How many Strawson episodes have you done?

2:42 Peter: Yeah, exactly. So I don't know how many of your listeners are annoyed that you haven't covered so many of the Presocratics, but I definitely have listeners who are like, when are you getting to Descartes? And the answer used to be, I have no idea. And now I'm, I don't know, five years.

2:57 Dylan: I mean, if you're really not doing any gaps, one of the problems you must be running into is as you get closer and closer, you have just more and more extant material that exists. And so the filter of bad forms of storing information is not helping you anymore.

3:13 Peter: Yeah, it's a disaster. Like with Parmenides, we can only read him because later people quote him. Right. So he's actually, in terms of his own works, he's lost. Right. What we have is quotations in works by other people. And if you compare that to what's going on, let's say the 17th or 18th century, where everyone who could get their hands on a printing press was able to commit thousands of pages of philosophical ideas to posterity. So actually, it's a real problem. And in all seriousness, I'm a little bit puzzled as to how to approach it. It's not so clear what it means to cover philosophy without any. From a period where you might have several hundred thinkers just from one country and one century who are extant. So we'll see.

3:54 Dylan: Because you're going to have to be making some selections yourself, which is something you probably haven't really had to do. Exactly. Right. You could just sort of go through the shelf.

4:04 Peter: Yeah. So even though for Latin medieval, even though you've got manuscripts and not printed works, there are hundreds, if not thousands of extant scholastic authors. So one thing I do is I cover things thematically instead of just, here's a guy, here's a guy, here's a guy. Oh, look, there's a woman, here's a guy, here's a guy, here's a guy. That's, by the way, something else I should Maybe mention is that I do a lot of focus on women in the history of philosophy insofar as the historical record allows. But even for the medieval period, there's certainly been a selection process where I maybe would sweep up five or six people by talking about a movement like the Oxford Calculators or something.

And I might give a few examples of a broader phenomenon like certain kind of commentary on Aristotle or whatever. So it's not like I really literally do everybody. And in fact, I think probably the only period where you can do everybody is ancient philosophy up till about Aristotle. And I didn't even do that. There are some minor pre Socratics I didn't cover.

4:58 Mark: So I long had you in mind to be guest on this episode because of your very early episode, obviously on Parmenides, which is a nice little less than 20 minute summary, in fact, of that. You introduce what metaphysics is. You talk about some of the other things that were going on in that time. So in terms of the actual Parmenides discussion, it's 12 minutes. If folks want to stop and go listen to Peter's episode on that, that would not be inappropriate. But we're not going to assume that given that way of choosing to deliver the information about Parmenides, you are of necessity not talking about the myriad of interpretations.

You're more or less making it sound like there is a coherent story that we can tell from reading the text. And certainly there are things about the text that are fairly uncontroversial. In the parts that we have, there's an introduction, a bunch of mythological images. We're going to hear the truth and then the truth, the goddess talking. For the bulk of the treatise that we have of that we have two halves. We have the way of truth and the way of opinion, or sometimes put the way of seeming or the way of belief. There are several ways that people translate that.

So the three distinct parts of this, the way of truth being the one that we have pretty much in full, we think from Simplicius many years later, just taking that down verbatim. But how to interpret that crucial part of the way of truth, and how to interpret how it connects to the other two parts have of great controversy. So in addition to the fragments of Parmenides, which we will link, there's a wikisource.org page that has those laid out there. It's only a couple pages, but we have a number of secondary sources that we looked at. I'm not going to run through them now.

They're going to be in the show notes, maybe if you bring one up by name the first time, actually want to quote it, then you can say what it is at that point. But I don't see the point in laying out seven things that not all of us even got around to reading right now.

6:46 Peter: Yeah, that's right. So can I say a couple of things about the poem and how it's structured?

6:50 Mark: Yeah, please.

6:51 Peter: So first of all, I'd like to emphasize something you mentioned, which is why can we read it at all? And it's worth bearing in mind always with the Presocratics, there is not a single extant, in other words, surviving book by a Presocratic philosopher. The first philosopher for whom we have complete works is Plato. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But basically we have to think about how long ago this is. I mean, the only other things we have from this culture are basically broken pieces of pottery, broken architectural monuments and buildings, and stone inscriptions.

So obviously we don't have the physical books that existed in the time of Parmenides or anything close to that. What we actually have is Byzantine manuscripts. So from medieval Greek speaking Christian community or society. What that means is from Constantinople, which actually, as it happens, is the period I'm covering in my own podcast right now. And the manuscripts we'd be using would be of Aristotle, who refers to Parmenides several times. But most importantly, as you mentioned, late ancient commentator on Aristotle named Simplicius. And Simplicius was one of the last pagan philosophers of antiquity.

And he was very concerned that because of the rise of Christianity, the ancient pagan wisdom was being lost to history. It was becoming, or had maybe had long been very difficult for anyone to get a hold of Parmenides poem. But he had a good library. And so in his commentary on Aristotle, he says, okay, here Aristotle's talking about Parmenides. You probably don't have access to the works of Parmenides, so here, I'll copy out the important part for you verbatim. And so actually we owe it to this late ancient, fairly obscure commentator on Aristotle that we can read most of the poem.

It's not true that he's the only source, but he's the most important source in general. What that means is that when we read Parmenides, what we're reading is little chunks of the poem that later authors have chosen to quote. So maybe Aristotle, maybe Simplicius, maybe someone else, like he appears in some Christian authors from late antiquity as well. One of the implications of that is that it's A little bit like a jigsaw puzzle. So we have a chunk here, a chunk there. Very occasionally the chunks overlap. So, like, there'll be a fragment where the last two lines are the first couple of lines of another fragment.

Right? And then we know for sure that those two fragments go together in running order. But in general, we are even guessing a little bit about the order that the fragments should be arranged. Nonetheless, I guess everybody agrees, like you said, that there's three parts. There's a mythological introduction where Parmenides is riding through these gates and going from the realm of night and day through the gates of justice to speak to this goddess who reveals the truth to him. So it's a very kind of mythic introduction. He actually uses the word mythos, which is where we get the word myth to refer to his own account.

And then you get the way of truth, which tells you how things really are. And then it's like, okay, but if you don't like that, or you can't believe that, or you want to know what you should believe if you can't believe the way of truth, as we'll talk about, I guess there's a lot of ways of taking this sh. But then you get the way of opinion, which is a much more traditional kind of presocratic cosmology. So that's where the work comes from and how it's structured.

9:53 Mark: So, Dylan and Wes, you want to kind of give your opening spiels. We each just gave a long speech. Say what you want to get into today or tell more of the story.

10:00 Wes: I don't have an opening spiel. I do have things I want to talk about, but it's too in the weeds. Technical to.

10:06 Dylan: Yeah, I think you guys gave a great introduction to framing the poem, and I think the historical points that Peter just made are important. I have a lot of questions that I'd like to get into about it. Some of them about the poem itself, some of them about interpreting the poem. And then I guess in particular, why there's even the seeming part, if you have the way of truth earlier and what we would interpret that as doing. And the other big question for me is part of me is thinking about this because I listened to Peter's podcast on Parmenides and on Zeno and on the idea of paradoxes.

And I found myself rekindled in my irritation with paradoxes for the simple reason of it being of the kind of patent absurdity to the section on truth. That is maybe one reason why you would have the way of seeming like if you can't face the truth, that you would do the Way of Seeming. I'd like us to talk a little bit about how that's working.

10:59 Peter: You know, I think that's maybe a good place to start because, I mean, we could probably spend the whole time talking about the Way of Truth, but it might make sense to have a discussion first about this issue. Dylan's asking about why do we have the two parts?

11:10 Wes: Well, I think it's going to be hard to answer that question unless we lay out these arguments.

11:14 Mark: Yeah, luckily our text is short enough that we can almost read the whole thing. Certainly we can read the whole way of truth out loud and be able to talk about it line by line, which is what these commentaries have done. But yeah, I think before we get into those potential weeds, because some of the commentaries this Barnes in particular that Peter had recommended just about made me want to shoot myself because it was just going so slowly through every little sentence and looking at the Greek and, you know, of course, that's what you have to do.

And that's where a lot of the difficulty in interpreting this comes from. It's Jonathan Barnes, 1979. The pre Socratic philosophers. To follow my own instructions on defining what secondary source I'm referring to, can we give a little of sort of the. What is the philosophical import? We think how it's been characterized to us, the cliche Dylan already mentioned, Zeno's Paradox. Zeno was a follower of Parmenides. And so the thing that's come down to us is that Parmenides is giving us this metaphysical view, view of Monism, that all is one and it's very otherworldly.

This gets interpreted as the thing that Plato picked up on, even though we see in the Sophist. We had a past episode on that where Plato is giving an account, really a response to Parmenides, where if all is one, you can't actually talk about nothingness. You can't talk about negation. As soon as you talk about negation, that would be cutting the one in half. And Plato just clears this right up by saying, well, no, maybe there is something we can say why this would even be motivating in the first place. There would be some problem talking about negative existentials we've talked about in other episodes.

In other words, if I want to say Santa Claus does not exist, how is it that I can be referring to Santa Claus in the first part of the sentence and then saying he doesn't exist? What is the thing that doesn't exist? That is the problem of negative existentials. And the solution to that that we got in the sophist is, well, we can still talk about non existence if we're just talking about different properties. So when we're saying Santa Claus does not exist, maybe we're saying of all the people out there, they are different from the image that we have of Santa Claus, of all the people that there have been in history.

So we're talking about, we're talking about the differences between using the word is in an existential sense, does something exist or not? And using it as predication. Does it have the property of being the kind of person that has the beard and gives out presents?

13:25 Wes: And the sophist effectively makes this distinction and tries to solve the Parmenidean problem by making that distinction and saying that when we say something is not, we're really just saying it's other than we're not making any existential claims. So to say the cat is not black is not to say something about the cat's existence, therefore to fall into a paradox, but it's just to say that there's this class of black things and the cat doesn't fall into it, that there's an otherness relation. You know, you've talked a little bit about the various interpretations.

Part of what we'll get into here is whether or not we think that Parmenides is confused about this, whether he's really just talking about negative existentials, as I think Bertrand Russell thought he was, or if he's also referring to negative predication, to any use of not. Because the basic idea, right, is that with the way of truth, he's objecting to that. He's objecting in some sense to negation, whether it's to existential negatives or to negative predication or both.

14:24 Peter: Can I make a sort of comment about whether Plato's response to Parmenides is plausible? One thing about the way of opinion, the second part of the poem is that first of all we don't have very much of it, but it's a cosmology which apparently derived all things from two principles, namely light and dark or day and night. And in that way it's like a lot of other pre Socratic cosmologies. So like Empedocles with love and Strife, for example. And if you think about that cosmology, basically what you have there is an opposition between two antithetical principles which are different from one another, right?

So it's not light and not light only, it's light and dark. Maybe you could think about dark as just the privation of light, in which case it's just light and not light. But if we assume that Parmenides is giving us the way of opinion as something like the next best version, so the best story you could tell that isn't actually the way of truth, which is even better. It's not clear what that would mean. But suppose it's something like that. Then I find it quite implausible that Parmenides is just confused because it hasn't occurred to him that he could work with explanatory principles that are different from each other or opposed.

Because his cosmology, the positive cosmology he gives you in the way of opinion, looks exactly like that. And so it seems to me that he understands that you could try to explain everything through opposition or difference in fact, through two principles which are sort of defined relative to each other by being different or contrasting to one another. And he thinks that that won't work. So he thinks the arguments of the way of truth rule that out somehow. You could ask, well, is Plato's criticism plausible? Right. Is it a good criticism? He's saying that we don't need to be monists.

We don't need to say that being is one the way that Parmenides says in the way of Truth. Because non being is thinkable in a sense, because you can think of it in terms of difference. So his example is when you say that Theaetetus does not fly. So Theaetetus is this young man, right? He doesn't fly. It means something like Theaetetus is different from something that flies. And so Parmenides is just being silly, right? And nouns are different than verbs, right? So he says if you get into it and analyze it, you'll see that when we do negation, what we're really doing is saying that one thing is different from another.

What I wanted to add, though, is that if you look at the way of opinion in Parmenides poem, you see that there he's putting forward a cosmology that depends on two principles, the light and the dark. And the light and the dark are opposed principles. In other words, they're different from one another. Parmenides clearly therefore understands that you could try to explain everything by appealing to maybe a property or explanatory principle, the light and something else that's different from it, namely the dark, and say that the two things somehow come together or interact to produce more complicated things.

And this is the kind of cosmology you get in other Presocratics like Empedocles, with love and strife. So my thought is that Parmenides has considered this option. In fact, he's even explored the option at length in the way of opinion, and he's rejected it. So I think that he gets that you can oppose things by saying, well, here's two things that are different or that are opposite even. And then he thinks that won't work because that very act of opposition or contrast between them, in other words, pointing out a difference itself presupposes the concept of non being or negation, and non being or negation as such is not graspable.

So I think he would probably say that when Plato explains non being as a kind of difference, he would say, well, but you have to trace difference back to the concept of non being. And I've shown you in the way of truth that non being is unthinkable.

18:16 Dylan: Yeah. So in a way, what you're pointing out is that there's a more sophisticated way of understanding. Don't fault Parmenides for making the simple mistake that Plato seems to saddle him with, but look for what it is he would be meaning given that he clearly understands that you could talk about the world in terms of difference, but take him seriously in the way of truth, to understand what he means by everything is one, so to speak.

18:43 Peter: Yeah, exactly.

18:44 Wes: And to start with, to figure out what he means when he rejects negation. I think that again, we have to comment on whether he's talking about predication or just negative existentials.

18:54 Peter: Although the thing is, I'm a little bit nervous about even that because I think if we say, well, here's a menu of different kinds of negation he might have in mind, which one is it? Is it negative existentials? Is it things like centaurs and Santa Claus, or is it things like not flying, not white?

19:10 Wes: Yeah, I agree. We've looked at some different interpretations, which I think for some scholars they focus on negative existentials because that seems to be what makes sense. Right. That's a real problem. Negative predication, on the face of it, seems like it would be a confused thing to reject. And we just went into. Peter, you just went into how. Well, maybe trying to treat negative predication as otherness, in fact presupposes non being in some way. And I. And I like that. And I think we could give an explanation of that.

19:42 Peter: Right. And so, in fact, I guess what I'm suggesting is that really any kind of opposition, differentiation, negation you can think of, I suspect that what Parmenides would Say is that at the root of that you need to have the concept of non being. Whatever he means by that and why, that becomes the big question. But I think that trying to domesticate Parmenides by saying, oh, well, there's no such thing as centaurs, so I can say that centaurs have hooves, right? I mean, that actually is a good philosophical question. But I think that's a much less radical question than the question that Parmenides is asking.

What Parmenides is asking is, how can you make use of any negation at all, of any kind? And so all these different, this kind of subspecies of negation, if it turns out that somehow in the background they presuppose the notion of non being, if non being is unthinkable, then those more limited forms of negation will also be unthinkable because they presuppose something unthinkable. So I think that's really the strength of his theory. And I think that if we kind of rush into saying, well, what particular kind of negation does he have in mind? I think that misses the power of the way of truth, which is that maybe all ways of negating or contrasting or opposing presuppose this unthinkable notion, which is non being.

21:08 Wes: If negative predication is part of it. We need to explain a way that doesn't make him look naive or just simply wrong.

21:14 Dylan: I guess what I would like to get into a little bit more then is how talking about difference necessarily means talking about non being. So if I take the way of truth and say, well, I need to exercise the discussion of non being out of it, and I say, okay, well, when he talks about one, what he's talking about is that the only thing that I can say truthfully about things in speaking about the world would be speaking about their being. And it was only by following that that I can know and understand the world as it truly is. And I could never understand the world in terms of non being because it's not possible to do so. It's not clear to me on that that that then means that difference is entailed with non being as opposed to difference being entailed with always talking about individual beings. I see why you would go down there, but it's not clear to me that it's required.

22:18 Mark: I guess the wikisource. Org that thing that I handed out. This is a 1920 translation by John Burnet. I think the one we agreed on is from this Kirk and Raven, 1957. The pre Socratic philosophers, the Kirk And Raven doesn't just give you the text. In fact, it puts the English in footnotes. It's so of course you know the Greek. So it puts the Greek in big letters and then explains it and discusses and tucks the English down in footnotes. And frankly, it doesn't sound any more modern. Do thou hearken and carry my word away? It doesn't sound any more modern than this 1920 version.

22:54 Wes: So they're doing that because the poem itself is written in archaic language, self consciously archaic.

23:00 Peter: But there is also. You guys are probably using the older just Kirk and Raven edition. There's an updated edition Kirk, Raven and Schofield, which has less archaic English. And it's right below the Greek, not in a footnote.

23:13 Mark: Ah, well, that is actually the one that I have in a paper copy, but because this older one is the one I found online. That is the one that I actually took notes off of, but because I didn't remember it being as offensive.

23:23 Peter: Yeah, I mean, the one for listeners to get a hold of is Kirk, Raven and Schofield.

23:27 Mark: Well, in any case, I'm going to read the 1921 right now and if you have better versions, if it's clearer from the other one, we can switch over to that. So this is fragment 2 and 3. Fragment 1 is the Extended thing about him being on a chariot and getting introduced to the Goddess who's telling him these things. So the Goddess is talking, come now, I will tell thee, and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away. The only two ways of search that can be thought of. The first, namely that it is and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the way of belief, for truth is its companion.

The other, namely that it is not and that it must needs not be. That, I tell thee, is a path that none can learn of at all. For thou canst not know what is not that is impossible, nor utter it. For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be. Is that intolerably archaic? And you should just read the new one, Peter.

24:18 Peter: Well, I have the new one in front of me. I can read it if you want.

24:20 Mark: Go ahead, give us that version.

24:22 Peter: Okay, so here's the new version in Kirkray from Come now and I will tell you, and you must carry my account away with you when you have heard it. The only ways of inquiry that are to be thought of the one that it is, and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the path of persuasion, for she attends upon truth. The other that it is not. And that it is needful that it not be. That, I declare to you, is an altogether indiscernible track. For you could not know what is not. That cannot be done, nor indicate it.

24:54 Mark: All right, a little more clear, but basically the same. So, yeah, what do we think? These two paths, just to make clear are not the paths that we're gonna. The way of truth and the way of opinion. The way of opinion is gonna be yet something else that we haven't gotten to yet. This is the other that it is not and can't be is a path none can learn of at all. So it's not even really a path.

25:16 Peter: One of the things, as we mentioned, there's this mythic introduction, right, where he's going along in a chariot led by maidens through this gate and then along a road to meeting this goddess. So actually there's this Greek word hodos, which keeps coming up over and over, which means way or path. So there's a metaphor that runs throughout the entire poem, which is this traveling metaphor. So the path of philosophical inquiry is here actually being kind of figuratively described in the opening mythic part as a literal path that you're driving along.

And then you pass from the realm of night and day, which is like the realm of opposition, into this place where you hear the truth from the goddess. And you're on a path that, I guess, only leads to truth or something. And so the idea is that people usually think that there's more than one way you can go, right? Is and is not, or day and night in the cosmological part, the way of opinion. And he's saying there's actually only one way. There's only the path of is. There's no path of is not. Because it's unthinkable, you can't travel it.

26:18 Mark: So even just to start, though, here he's saying the only two ways of search, the only two ways you could even think there might be a path, is the is and is impossible for it not to be, and is not and needs not be. In other words, it's impossible for it to be. So these are very strong modal claims, as we would say now, claims of the necessary existence and necessary non existence, which is kind of sounding like the ontological argument for the existence of God or something like this, which seems weird. Why would we think. Why would it be at all plausible as an initial thing, just to throw out there to say, yeah, either everything.

And I guess the question is still, what is the it? And the answer is that there is no it grammatically in Greek. So when we say it is or it is not, it's really just is and is not. And so that's one of the interpretive question is, well, what is the it? You know, presumably it's referring to whatever it is. The being, whatever. Yeah, the world.

27:16 Wes: Yeah. So what we talked about a little bit is fragment six, where we're just talking about is. And we can say a little more about that. But here we get the stronger modal claims involving necessity. I mean, this sort of thing we will see a lot of later on in the philosophical tradition. Right. If we're engaged in inquiry and we want to know something, knowing something means knowing what it is essentially. And to know what it is essentially is to know what it is, necessarily. I don't know if that's a legitimate association here, but. But that might be one way to make sense of this use of necessity.

27:53 Peter: Yeah. The Greek is not quite as obviously modal as the English suggests. Maybe. So it's hemen hopos esten te kai hos ouk esti me eini for your many listeners who know Ancient Greek. So I would probably translate that as something more like, on the one hand, that which just is and isn't. Not at all.

28:19 Mark: Right. The double negative. I saw that in several translations. Yep.

28:22 Wes: Yeah.

28:23 Peter: Because it's esti me einai. So that's very not easy to translate. The point is, though, I think it's not so much that we're getting necessary being and necessary non being. What we're getting here is something that just is and has no admixture of non being. And then the other option is going to be the other path that it is not, and that is needful that it not be. So again, I think the idea is that which isn't and really can't be at all. So something that has no admixture of being. So I think really the point about modality, that might be a little bit too technical or ambitious.

I think, really all he's saying is don't start with a mixture of being and non being. Start with the two options before you considered purely in themselves, being on the one hand, non being on the other. And if you think about just non being, you'll see that there's nothing to think about or say or indicate or grasp mentally.

29:26 Wes: Right.

29:27 Peter: So the only option you've got is just being. And if you say, well, I want to start with a mixture of being and non being, this is basically Plato's answer.

29:35 Wes: Right.

29:36 Peter: So you Start with the concept of difference rather than the concept of non being. And he would say, wait, that's already a mixture of being and non being. Because difference is like something that has a certain character which is not some other character. So you're mixing being and non being. You're not allowed to do that. You have to start with the most basic pure cases. Being just being and non being. Just non being, but just non being is something that you can't think about at all. So that option is eliminated. And just being, that's the option that's left.

30:05 Wes: We should say, though, the modal interpretation is one of the major interpretations, right?

30:10 Peter: Yeah. And you could. I mean, certainly like in that first line we were talking about when he says, ouk esti me einai. You can certainly translate it that as. It's not possible that it not be. That's certainly a reasonable translation of that Greek, by the way. Maybe it's worth saying the Greek is really weird in Parmenides poem.

30:30 Dylan: It's very, very poetic.

30:31 Peter: I mean, it's the. Yeah, but it's not poetic in the way that Homer's poetic. It's poetic in the way, like, what the hell are you talking about? So it's like really compressed. And he's playing around a lot with the.

30:45 Wes: Well, one of the commentaries called it archaic. Sure.

30:48 Peter: But I mean, he see it in Homer or archaic. This is both archaic and using very abstract Greek in a way that's very hard to understand. And I don't think that people that heard it read aloud to them, which is probably how it would have been first experienced. I don't think they would have immediately known what Parmenides was talking about either.

31:10 Dylan: Well, it makes you think that there's some sensibility to thinking of it as being mystical when we start talking about language that is that impenetrable. Right. Where makes it sound like it's religious.

31:22 Peter: Yeah. And of course, it has those religious trappings at the beginning as well.

31:25 Mark: Yeah. One of the sources that I had pointed out that I'm sure you guys did not read and I did not expect you to read was Karl Jaspers, the existentialist we've covered before in his Great Philosophers series. He has a very short chapter on Parmenides, and he just interprets Parmenides strictly as speaking tautologies. Being is non, being is not. And saying. Why would he bother to say that? I mean, being is. It's amazing. You know, that must be a cipher for something beyond the possibility of language because it's just so obvious. It's so not worth saying, but it's the most fundamental thing that being is. And so he just used that as a empty, not a modal claim. Not that me must be, but just that being is as just something that you have to just throw your spirit upon and it bounces around. You know that this is calling out for a mystical interpretation according to that strain.

32:22 Wes: Let me give a simpler non mystical interpretation. Parmenides had a tremendous influence on the philosophical tradition by way of Plato. And what we see in the entire poem is not stuff that's not going to come up again in the entire philosophical tradition. So let me give just for fragment two and three, if the claim is modal, then we might, to make sense of it, interpret that. And he's talking about what are the requirements of inquiry, which is another way of saying what must be the case if we're to know things. And if we take this claim as modal, we might think, okay, well, no necessary truths about things.

That's a requirement of knowledge. If we take it in the way Peter was suggesting, I think that means that we can't really know things in the world of becoming because of this admixture, which of course Plato and Socrates pick up on. The idea is that we need these because ultimately not being is going to be connected to becoming and to generation and change and decay. We actually need something stable and changeless to be the object of our knowing, to be the object of our knowledge. So for fragments two and three, I take this to be about the nature of inquiry and what's required of it, and particularly what can be the objects of inquiry and what can be the objects of knowledge.

On the modal interpretation, we might make sense of that by saying our objects of knowledge are necessary truths. On the other interpretation, where what's being rejected is an admixture of being and not being, that's intimately related to the idea that knowledge cannot be of the world, of the objects of empirical objects that are becoming because they are too unstable. And this not being is implicated in becoming. They're too unstable to be objects of knowledge. So we see this in Plato. We need something like the forms to be timeless, changeless objects of our knowledge.

I might be reading too much into this, but I think as a way of trying to make sense to it, and given the enormous influence that Parmenides had on Plato and the tradition, those are two ways of looking at this.

34:33 Peter: I agree with everything he just said, which is amazing given that we're talking about Parmenides, but also it's not only change, that's a problem. It's anything that involves negation. So, for example, it would also apply to, let's say, if you suppose that all of being consisted of a sphere, one half of which was red and the other was blue, and it wasn't changing, that would still be a problem. So it's not just change, it's differentiation. It's differentiation of shape, emptiness, anything like that. So anything that involves non being, not only change. So he Actually, there's another fragment shortly thereafter where he says that it can't be generated because it would have to come from non being. But it's not only change.

35:15 Wes: Yeah, change is what Plato focuses on because he's also interested in Heraclitus. And I think in one of these commentators or something else I read, maybe that they claim that Plato, in a way, is trying to do a fusion of Heraclitus and Parmenides, trying to sort of reconcile them.

35:32 Dylan: Maybe it's completely obvious, and maybe this is the part that I find myself struggling with, is that being has this implication of being eternal, right? So that behind all this, right, when we start talking about it is, there is an interpretation or an understanding at least, of the characteristic of being, what being is, what is is. Right. And that being is eternal. But the distinction between whether. Well, it seems like in Parmenides, Right. Then just to look at Peter's example, that anything that has distinction or difference, even if it's superficial or one of properties that don't have an existence in the same way as other beings, those are sort of subsumed into the whole thing, right?

So that you literally have no distinctions at all, putting aside the sphere and what it means to have a sphere in a universe of no distinction. And at that point I just, again, I get. I myself, I just get confused. That's why I go back to the end of the poem. My avenue into it is to again, go back to the focus on things that have being. And that sentence right there just contradicts what he seems to be saying in the way of truth. Things that have being, you wouldn't even talk about. Things that have being you would talk about.

36:50 Mark: Yeah, we should say. Grammatically, it's not even clear. It's not just that esti doesn't have a subject, but it could have a singular or plural subject that you don't conjugate the verb either way. So does being have to be singular? Could it be beings? It's not really clear just grammatically.

37:08 Peter: I mean, it's esten. So it certainly looks Like a singular unspecified subject. Yeah, yeah, you're right that if it's neuter plural, it'd be different plural, but it's probably a singular subject.

37:20 Mark: This is me parroting what somebody said on YouTube that I just listened to this morning. So I don't know. I'll take your word. They're wrong about that professor at Sheffield.

37:31 Peter: Yeah, I wouldn't put too much. I mean, it's true that in Greek. Okay, this is nerdy. It's true that in Greek, neuter plural subjects can take a singular verb, but you would never do that unless there was actually an explicit neuter plural noun in the vicinity to take the verb. So it's a singular.

37:50 Mark: All right, Well, I will attribute that to Angie Hobbs of the University of Sheffield.

37:56 Peter: She knows Greek, though she's a friend of mine.

37:58 Wes: Assuming that you're relating what she said correctly, and so she must be thinking,

38:03 Peter: like, in theory, it could be a neuter plural. Yes.

38:07 Wes: Isn't it true that, as in English, it could be something taken collectively would take a singular verb or.

38:13 Peter: Sure, yeah. Why not?

38:15 Wes: Speculation.

38:16 Peter: Yeah. I mean, like, for example, you could say, to pan esti, everything is.

38:21 Wes: Exactly.

38:22 Dylan: But I guess to continue being inarticulate, it seems to me that this interpretation implies an understanding of what being is, rather than being inquiry into what being is.

38:34 Peter: Right, right.

38:35 Mark: It's a revelation. I think one of the things that's confusing and I was a little unfair when I said, why would you just throw out right at the beginning the claim that you have to either accept necessary being or necessary non being, at least according to the Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy by David Sedley, Chapter 6, Parmenides and Melissus. He actually lays this out as if it was like a deductive argument, though it always works backwards. He gives the conclusion first, and then he gives the reasons for it. So just reading the beginning and saying, why would you say that? Well, we haven't gotten there yet, so maybe we should as quickly as possible, get to fragment six.

39:11 Wes: Well, also, the way I was describing it, you would charitably think of it as a conceptual analysis or an analysis of the concept of inquiry and what it implies. Inquiry, if it's possible, implies something about being.

39:24 Dylan: So do you mean by that, Wes? And this is another thought that occurred to me is that he's really just bringing on the principle of non contradiction here, that that's what's going on.

39:34 Wes: No, I just. I mean, I gave my two versions of what I think he means in fragments two and three.

39:38 Dylan: Okay, sorry.

39:39 Mark: Let's try to articulate that interpretation, which I don't think is one we directly saw, but is close to the Jaspers that we see. He does present this like, look, just thought itself implies that either you're talking being or you're talking non being. And you can't talk non being, so you're only talking being. But that does sound like it's just straight up the principle of non contradiction. Either things are or they aren't, and

40:01 Dylan: things can't simultaneously be and not be in the same way at the same time. It's straight out of the metaphysics.

40:08 Mark: So he says that later. But yes, this seems premature though, Peter, are we reading Aristotle back into him here?

40:14 Peter: I mean, certainly you're right that he's giving you two exclusive options is and is not. And what I was trying to push is the idea that rather than it being about necessary being or necessary non being, it's about being that's exclusive of non being and non being that's exclusive of being. But even if I'm not right about that, you're right. Certainly there's a kind of implied principle of non contradiction, like these can't both be true at the same time. I think that's certainly implicitly there. But maybe if you want to think about like, why is what he's saying plausible?

Because certainly the principle of non contradiction does not give you the idea that if you can say P, then you cannot say not P. Like Peter is bald. Peter is not bald. Right. You can entertain both thoughts, they're both thinkable. So I think maybe a better way of thinking about this is that pure non being. Or if you don't like my purity idea, then just non being. Whatever he means by that, it's not a target of speech or thought. So I think a better way of thinking about this contrast might be that, and here I agree again with west, that he's talking about the conditions of possible inquiry, something else that Plato cares a lot about.

So if you think about the Meno, for example, and what he says is, well, look, if you're going to do an inquiry, then there better be something that you're inquiring about, or if you're going to say something, you better say something. You can't say nothing and speak. You can't think nothing and think. So I think of it much more in terms of whether or not there's an object for these verbs that are being thrown around here. And so he uses verbs like, which means to think. It's almost like seeing. So you can't see nothing. If you see nothing, then you're not seeing at all.

And similarly, if you think about nothing, you're not thinking. And I think that's maybe a more plausible reason. I mean, the non contradiction thing is important as a kind of precondition for that. But the reason why it's a plausible argument is that non being doesn't sound like a possible object of thought or speech. Then again, I would say that's only plausible, that claim that non being isn't a possible object of thought or speech. I'll buy that, as long as non being doesn't just mean like difference or any kind of negation, like being black instead of white.

Because of course being black instead of white is thinkable. I think it has to be non being. That has no purchase on being.

42:30 Dylan: Yeah. So insofar as you talk about negative existentials, then you would reframe that as I'm talking about being. It's just that they don't happen to exist. And you make a distinction between fictional being.

42:42 Peter: Yeah, like Sherlock Holmes.

42:44 Wes: Right.

42:44 Peter: By these standards, Sherlock Holmes is a being, not a non being.

42:47 Dylan: That's right. You can't talk about non being, but you can talk about whether beings exist.

42:51 Peter: Yeah. I mean, Doyle wrote whole books about Sherlock Holmes. So Sherlock Holmes is clearly not the sort of thing that Parmenides has in mind when he talks about non being or when he says that you can't talk about non being. Rather, the first rule of non being is don't talk about non being.

43:06 Mark: Can we move to fragment six? Peter, do you want to read your version?

43:10 Peter: What is there to be said? And thought must needs be, for it is there for being, but nothing is not. I bid you ponder that, for this is the first way of inquiry from which I hold you back. But then from that on which mortals wander knowing nothing, two headed for helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts and they are carried along, deaf and blind, at once, dazed, undiscriminating hordes who believe that to be and not to be are the same and not the same. And the path taken by them all is backward turning.

43:42 Mark: So that's not adding very much to our theory of being and not being. It seems to just be clarifying. I think it's easiest to understand, Peter, on your interpretation about the admixture of being. People who are looking backwards and forwards are mixing these two principles together.

43:57 Peter: Yeah, I think this fragment's more about what happens if you deviate from the goddess's advice. You wind up going in two directions. So you're basically wandering back and forth. There's this nice Greek word at the end, backwards turning, palintropos, going a certain way and then turning back and retracing your steps.

44:13 Dylan: Very Odyssean.

44:14 Peter: And of course that's exactly what we're going to get in the way of opinion. Because of the way of opinion you have light and dark, these two principles. So it's like this idea of something in its opposite.

44:25 Wes: So this seems to be the realm of admixture of being and non being we might call the realm of becoming an empirical phenomena. And the problem with that realm is the non being problem. So you can take this broadly as a rationalist, anti empiricist stand at this point.

44:41 Peter: Yeah. And actually I'd sort of be curious to know what you three think about this, because I think this a great example and maybe the great example, the original example, at least in the Western tradition of a philosopher saying, well, all your experience and everyday life be damned. I have a two line argument that shows that it's all false. I know that you believe in like Strawberry Shortcake and the existence of Maryland and whatever, but actually all those things imply that non being is real and non being isn't real. So it's all an illusion.

45:14 Wes: So, yeah, we see this repeatedly through the philosophical tradition. We see it in Plato and we see it in Kant and Schopenhauer.

45:22 Peter: Yeah, you see it in India with Advaita Vedanta.

45:24 Wes: Right.

45:25 Peter: So Advaita Vedanta is like the only thing that's real is consciousness. It's Brahman. And everything else just appears to Brahman. And enlightenment consists in identifying yourself only with the subject of consciousness and not all the illusions that appear to it. And all these different thinkers, what they're doing is they're using various philosophical methods to radically undermine not just empiricism, but pretty much every concept we have in Kant.

45:49 Wes: We see it as a distinction between thing and itself and appearance. And the world of difference becomes conceptual apparatus. It all becomes something provided by the mind.

46:00 Dylan: The notion that what we see is not the truth. Obviously it's not just in the philosophical tradition. Right. It's in the scientific tradition. It's all kinds of traditions. Right. In some ways, anybody who makes a claim about knowing is going to be saying something like, well, what you think you know is just the appearance of things and what is really going on is something else. And then there's going to be the account of what that is. And there is a kind of radicalness here about the oneness in that argument. But Peter said, wondered what we thought about this sort of couple line argument.

This is everything that you ever thought was completely wrong. And this is the kind of thing that I was referring to when I was talking about my frustration with paradoxes in that on the one hand I see how they move you forward, where you say, okay, if I follow just my concepts about the world, the way I'm thinking about it, and I'm pretty careful about it, I've come with up with this contradiction. The Zeno one is the perfect example, right? I can't get from here to there. I have to go halfway every time, halfway every time. And then that conflicts with my experience.

And what that means is that I still need to have some kind of alignment. There's something wrong with one or the other. There's something wrong with either my interpretation of my experience or there's something wrong with my categories and my way of thinking about it. And so, I mean, for me, when I think about Zeno's paradox, well, the numbering of distance and the relationship between distance and time, you're not thinking about it correctly because obviously I get from here to there, obviously I'll get killed by the spear, even though it goes halfway every time.

Then that's where I get frustrated with it, is that you would stop there. You'd say, oh, well, now maybe that's not giving enough credit to Zeno. There's all kinds of things you think about. So when I get to this paradox here about the relationship between not being and non being and this two line argument that just sort of blows everything apart, I feel like, well, okay, so now's the time where you go back and look at your experience, you know, and you ought to be thinking about that. And there has to be more of a push and a pull if you really want to get to knowing what's going on with the world.

You've pushed as far as you can with your thinking about being and non being, and you've come to a conclusion. And that conclusion is deeply and completely at odds with your experience of the world, which is full of difference. And at that point I'm like, okay, well, something needs to be revised. If one of my principles is that there ought to be some kind of consistency and some wholeness to it. And so that's where I feel like, oh, well, you've contented yourself with a kind of religious mystery of a kind of aporia about oneness in the world.

And. And at that point I feel like, well, okay, so you don't really want to know that much about the world.

48:38 Wes: I don't think we've reached the point of religious mystery. Again, he's saying something which is not dissimilar to what we see in Plato and Kant, for instance, and even as you mentioned in science, the idea that the way the world really is is radically different from what is simply the world of our sensation.

48:57 Dylan: I agree with that.

48:58 Mark: But there's something paradoxical, you know, stronger than the world of the in itself is different than the world of our experience in the way this presented. Because the whole premise of being able to have the goddess talk to you, and for me, Parmenides, the philosopher, to then talk to my audience, is that we are not each other. There is a difference between you and me, and me and the goddess. So the very prerequisites of the inquiry itself seem to conflict with the conclusion of the inquiry, which is that there is only being. And the way that that's going to play out is that there can be only one being and that all difference is illusory. Etc.

49:35 Wes: Yeah, but that doesn't negate the world of appearance in some sense. Or maybe it does, but at least for a thinker like Kant, it doesn't negate the world of appearance to say that there are things in themselves. There are charitable ways to think about this and save this. So let me give my reading of this because I spent a lot of time walking around Boston thinking about this, and I was trying to think about how to make sense. If what he's on about here is not just negative existentials, but predications. And by the way, I don't expect anyone to agree with this or like this interpretation, but if you want to have a very straightforward ontology, and you have objects and then you have properties, and the properties are these real things out in the world, and they're particulars themselves, or they're part of a particular object and they're attached in that way, then in a way you could reduce the problem of negative predication to the problem of negative existentials.

So for instance, if you say the cat is black, again with your ontology, you might think there's this object and then there's property, and the two things are attached and they're out there in the world. But if you say the cat is not black, you're not doing the same thing. Not black or non black, let's say, doesn't correspond to anything in the world, it doesn't have a referent in the same sense. Or we might think it has an extension. All the non black objects, but it doesn't really have intension, which suggests to me that all of this in the end really is related to the problem of universals.

And it's apropos that Parmenides is the opponent in the dialogue of the same name, because it starts to look to me like Parmenides is actually a kind of nominalist, or I would call him by the end of a transcendental nominalist. And what he's objecting to is a sort of conceptual apparatus which we just kind of briefly referred to, which seems like it must simply be conceptual apparatus which simply doesn't seem to line up directly with concrete particulars in the world. And then when we get to the whole idea of the sphere, it turns out that for Parmenidean nominalism, the only particular that we're allowed to talk about is the whole, for various reasons, because once we start talking about the parts, we start getting into negation again.

We start getting into all that conceptual apparatus which is inherently problematic.

51:59 Peter: I think there's at least a family resemblance between what you're suggesting there and what I was saying about thought needing an object. So if you say, well, what is this property of not being black? What does that add?

52:10 Wes: Yeah, there's no particular referent for that in the way that there is for black.

52:14 Peter: Right. And so now imagine that maybe another different way of making Parmenides is even more plausible. If all of our concepts somehow involve being contrasted to other concepts so that they're really just the negations of these other concepts, they're defined negatively by being excluded somehow or excluding everything else, rather, then you're left with nothing but negative concepts. Right. So that would be a terrible idea to say that all of your concepts were negative.

52:43 Wes: Yeah. And that's a lead in to the universals. Right. If I'm a nominalist, and I think black is not this universal black, which is its own entity, but I think it's really part of the object, or it's a particular thing attached to the object, however you want to think about it, then I can conceivably see how allowing negation is a slippery slope to saying any property is like a negative property. Any property is just this universal abstract thing, and ultimately it's just part of the mind in the way that everything seems to get sucked into the mind. In Kant, you're on the slippery slope, and that's what Parmenides really wants to try to avoid.

53:20 Peter: It goes back to what we started with, which is what I think Mark mentioned from Plato's Sophist, namely, can we invoke difference without having to invoke non being as such? Because if we can, then we're fine, and we can have lots of positive concepts which are contrasted to one another, and we can have our nice variegated world. But if behind every difference there lurks non being, which remember that Plato himself admits that you can't think about or talk about non being. So that's why he translates talk non being and to talk of difference. But if Parmenides can maneuver us into the position of saying that actually all talk of difference does presuppose talk of non being, the kind of things Wes was just saying would give you reason to think that that might be true, then we're in trouble and we're on the road, almost literally the road that Parmenides keeps talking about to Monism.