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

0:00 Mark: So I think we should move to fragment 8, the 1 simplicius quotes, the one that is the longest, that has the most actual argumentation in it for this way of truth, plus it has the transition to the way of belief. Go ahead, start us off. Read the first bit.

0:13 Peter: Okay, so here's fragment eight. There still remains just one account of a way that it is on this way there are very many signs that being uncreated and imperishable, it is whole and of a single kind, and unshaken and perfect it never was, nor will be, since it is now altogether one continuous for what birth will you seek for it? How and whence did it grow? I shall not allow you to say, nor to think from not being for it is not to be said, nor thought that it is not. And what need would have driven it later rather than earlier, beginning from the nothing to grow thus it must either be completely, or not at all.

Nor will the force of conviction allow anything besides it to come to be ever from not being. Therefore justice has never loosed her fetters to allow it to come to be or to perish, but holds it fast, and the decision about these things lies in it is or it is not. But it has in fact been decided as is necessary to leave the one way unthought and nameless. For it is no true way but that the other is and is genuine. For how could what is be in the future? How could it come to be? For if it came into being, it is not, nor is it if it is ever going to be in the future.

Thus coming to be is extinguished and perishing unheard of.

1:31 Mark: All right, so this was used explicitly later in the Middle Ages. For how we could make sense of the notion of God.

1:37 Wes: Right.

1:37 Peter: But this is still just being in a nutshell. He seems to be saying that being can't come to be. So it can't first not exist and then exist, because it would have to come to be from not being. And it also cannot perish because it would have to go from being into non being. And there's no such thing as non being. So it's neither generated nor destroyed. I think Dylan said it before that it's eternal and this would be the argument for that.

2:01 Mark: So did he discover the principle of sufficient reason here? If there was nothing in the first place, what would cause something to start being? No, it just has to have always been there. It doesn't make any sense for sure.

2:13 Peter: On the other hand, I think his argument would even rule out it kind of randomly popping into existence because it would have had to not be and then randomly be. He doesn't even have to appeal to the need for a cause. He can just say it can't make a transition from not being to being. And that's what generation would be. So it can't be generated.

2:34 Dylan: It's fundamentally eternal.

2:35 Peter: Right.

2:36 Dylan: This section made me think immediately of being as the whole of all things. And putting aside whether things are beings and that that doesn't change. And there is something about that that is fundamental to the way of thinking about anything. That you have to have some kind of whole, which is your starting place, your very way of rationally speaking about the world. And if I take that being is that whole, then it becomes tractable. We don't have where difference comes from, and we would have in it that generation and annihilation are distinctions that are in some way illusory because they're on top of a whole that is fundamentally unchanging. A physical analogy would be is there's always the same amount of energy. That's the amount of energy it's always been there in the universe. That amount is not changing. You might reconfigure it, but that's it.

3:33 Wes: By the time we get to the end of this section, we will have this everlasting, undifferentiated, motionless sphere, as David Sedley puts it in the Cambridge Companion article, which I thought was very helpful link to that for listeners. And it looks like basically one big great monad. But it's the one particular we're left with that we're allowed to say anything about. And the only thing we're allowed to say about it, I think, is that it exists. Although we're allowed to say it's one and it's everlasting, but I think those are so intimately conceptually tied to existence in a way might be justifiable to say he's reduced the world to one particular and to one possible claim about that.

4:14 Peter: Can I also point out something that some people think is going on here, that I think is not going on here? It may seem a little bit perverse. Some people look at this part of the fragment and say, ah, the one or being in Parmenides is timeless, so it's outside of time. Because he keeps saying, well, you can't say, well, it isn't here yet, or it's in the future, because then it's not yet being, waiting around to be being, and it can't have been non being in the past, etc. But I don't think he actually says that it's not subject to time. He doesn't say it is subject to time, but I don't see any reason to think that it's not subject to time.

I think he's just saying that it's not changing. There might be conceptual puzzles about how you could have something be subject to time if it's not changing. But I don't think Parmenides is actually getting into those conceptual puzzles here. I think he's just saying that you have to rule out, for example, not all past and future tense with respect to being. I don't think he rules that out necessarily. I think he just rules out past and future tense if you're talking about it being non being in the past or non being in the future. So the relevant part is where he says something about it being now.

5:26 Wes: At the very beginning of the fragment, he says, nor was it ever, nor will it be, for now it is all at once. And this is my translation. Or is that what you're thinking of?

5:35 Peter: Yeah, that's exactly right.

5:36 Wes: Yeah, it's like the fourth fifth.

5:38 Peter: Yeah, it never was nor will be, since it is now altogether one continuous. So obviously that sentence is one that's susceptible to the timelessness reading. You can't use past and future verbs for being. But I think what he means is just you can't say that being lies in the future or lies in the past. It's always here right now. But I take it that he would have conceived of being as enduring through time without change. So not timeless, subject to time, but also not changing in any way. I think that's what he's saying, but I have to admit it's not clear.

6:16 Mark: A possible response to that would be that it can't exist over time. In fact, not that it is timeless, but that time really doesn't exist. Augustine has things that sound like this, that the only reality is the perpetual now, what was no longer is. It's unreal what is going to be. That doesn't exist either. So there really is only the present. Reading this back into that and thinking, if you could cut up being, you might think that for something to really be a monad, you can't cut it up, because once you can cut it up, there are parts. But I don't think this is how Parmenides is thinking.

Right. So if you cut it temporally between before time t and after time T, then it seems like it's got multiple parts those are different than each other. At least most of the interpreters I was reading here. It seems like existing over time, unchanging, as you say, and existing in space, because the same thing, if it exists in space at all, it seems you could cut it off and say the right half and the left half or something. He makes that less extreme by saying it's a sphere. So there's nothing that would really distinguish the left half from the right half.

But there's certainly lots of places that you could cut a sphere in which you would have different size bits or something. None of that is going to seemingly bother him.

7:20 Peter: Okay, so here's the next part of Fragment eight, because that's actually about whether it's divided. So we're up to line 22 of fragment 8. Nor is it divided, since it all exists alike, nor is it more here and less there, which would prevent it from holding together. But it is all full of being, so it is all continuous, for what is draws near to what is, but changeless within the limits of great bonds. It exists without beginning or ceasing, since coming to be and perishing have wandered very far away, and true conviction has thrust them off, remaining the same and in the same place it lies on its own, and thus fixed it will remain, for strong necessity holds it within the bonds of a limit which keeps it in on every side.

And so this is what Mark is just saying, that it has this really spatial description in this part of the poem. And he says that it's not divided into parts at all, and presumably not even divisible into parts. Right. It's complete and whole the way it is.

8:16 Mark: Yeah, My translation actually says nor is it divisible, since it is all alike.

8:20 Peter: That's actually a problem of Greek So the word is diaireton, which can mean both. So you have a choice about how to translate it.

8:30 Dylan: When we ultimately start talking about it being a sphere being not only can't be in time, it doesn't have extension in space or anything like that. Not only can't you cut it in half, you can't point to different parts of it.

8:42 Wes: Well, Sedley, in the Cambridge Companion article, wants to take the spherical thing literally, right?

8:47 Peter: Yeah. And I agree with him about that. I think he's serious about it being a sphere. I think he does think it's spatially extended and that it's a limited sphere.

8:55 Dylan: So how is it that I have a spatially extended sphere, even if completely uniform, and I can't distinguish one place from another? Is it simply because there's no difference between those places that I can't tell that they're different? That sheer uniformity is my problem?

9:09 Peter: Yeah. It has no actual parts. There's no cuts in it.

9:12 Dylan: Those are two different things. Right. I can have a completely uniform sphere and still have location even if I'm standing inside the sphere. I could talk about locations.

9:22 Wes: It's like a great big jawbreaker, Dylan, and there's no way you're going to bite into it.

9:28 Dylan: I'm trying to understand how if it has extension, it doesn't have here and there.

9:32 Peter: You could say that there would be points of the sphere closer to the center and points of the sphere closer to the edge.

9:37 Dylan: That's exactly what I'm saying.

9:39 Peter: Yeah. So that's why I said there's no actual parts.

9:42 Dylan: That would be correct. I'm going to be really persnickety. There are locations that are closer to the edge and locations closer to the center, but there may not be points.

9:50 Peter: So I think then he would still say, well, well, if you want to contrast the regions of the sphere or locations of the sphere, then of course you're going to have to introduce some kind of distinction or difference between them. But you can't do that because you can't think about non being. Yeah.

10:06 Dylan: Because the coordinate system I'd be using in this case, in order to speak of it, I have to be speaking of non being.

10:11 Peter: Yeah.

10:11 Dylan: Okay.

10:13 Peter: So, I mean, obviously what you're saying is very intuitive, which is that you can't have the notion of spatial extension at all without implicitly having non being. But I think what he's going to say is that as long as his description of the situation doesn't involve any actual differentiation, then he's fine, because then it's you who'd be coming along, taking the first step down the way of opinion by starting to introduce distinctions in something that has no distinctness. And maybe here it's worth mentioning, just briefly, that there's a follower of Parmenides named Melissus, who's one of the few philosophers in history who was also a successful naval commander because he was an admiral in a Greek navy.

And he carried on Parmenides project, but disagreed with Parmenides by arguing that being can't be a sphere. It actually has to be indefinite, so it goes off in all directions and never ends. So he imagines an undifferentiated indefinite body stretching off in all directions. And I think it's actually interesting that when Parmenides was criticized or modified, the way that that first came wasn't in the form of someone saying, oh, well, you shouldn't be thinking about it spatially at all. Like, it shouldn't be a sphere, it should be immaterial or something.

It shouldn't be spatial. Rather, you have Melissus saying, yeah, it's fine to think it as being spatial, but just don't think about it as having an edge, because if it's got an edge, then it must have non being on the far side of the edge. And he denies that.

11:33 Dylan: And that makes a lot of sense. This way of speaking of it makes being into a substratum. The one thing that exists is the indistinguishable, I'm going to say, material, and that's probably going too far of the universe. And anything else that you would conceive of making out of it is in some primary sense illusory, because the being itself is indistinct. And I don't know what the equivalent term to eternal is for spatial always everywhere, omnipresent. Yeah, that's a good one.

12:05 Peter: Yeah. And that's Melissus's reading. Right. I like to imagine what Parmenides would have said to Melissus, his follower, and I think what he would say is, well, hang on a second, there's no non being around the sphere that is being, because non being isn't a thing. Right, right. So I think he would say to Melissus, you're being silly because you're imagining that beyond the sphere there's empty space.

12:28 Dylan: Yeah.

12:28 Wes: Maybe we're supposed to imagine the sphere from the inside.

12:31 Peter: Yeah. Or like Aristotle's cosmos is a sphere, and Aristotle denies that there's void outside the cosmos. There's nothing outside the cosmos, not even empty space. And if we have a hard time imagining that that's our fault.

12:43 Dylan: Well, and that's actually completely conceivable. Right. But what that would mean is that locations that got as far away from one another would always be equidistant from one another. That's conceivable that that would not be in a container, but that as far as you could get away in location from one to another, is that all of those distances would be equivalent to one another, and that would be a cosmos that was a sphere.

13:06 Peter: Well, I was thinking Melissus's revision of Parmenides might handle your worry, because before you were talking about locations that are closer to the center of the sphere or further away from the center of the sphere. Whereas if being is just an indefinite full universe that goes off in all directions forever and there's no edge, then there's no reference points that we can use to say something's closer to anything than anything else. So there's no center in that sense. You might think Melissus's position is an improvement on Parmenides, but it seems like his objection to Parmenides is not something quite that refined, but rather just, well, if there's an edge, then there'd have to be non being outside the edge. And I think Parmenides would just say, no, there doesn't.

13:46 Dylan: Boundaries don't imply other sides to them.

13:49 Peter: Right.

13:49 Mark: Yeah, that was historically illuminating to me. I don't remember which of the secondary sources said it, but that even considerably after Aristotle, people were still having to argue for the idea that space is infinite, strangely, because, as Kant says, we don't really understand it either way. Either space is infinite and we don't understand that, or space is finite and we don't understand that either. So really talking about being as a whole, being either of these things somehow defies human understanding. But nonetheless, we seem to have just settled on. Of course, there must be the other side of any boundary. We take our model of space from Euclid.

14:20 Peter: Now the physicists have come along and told us that it's actually something even weirder than any of these options.

14:25 Wes: Space is curved, it's finite. Right. Current cosmology has it as finite.

14:30 Dylan: Yep. Four dimensional finite sphere, so hypersphere.

14:35 Wes: Sorry. Good job, Parmenides. You got the conservation of matter and energy. I listened to a Philosophy Bites podcast, which is an interview with Raymond Tallis, who's a doctor, became a philosopher, and he actually sees Parmenides as grandfather of science, not just because of those little tidbits, but because of his idea that things could be so radically different. Than the way they seem is the most important proto scientific concept. And then via influence through Plato and the whole tradition, science is continuous with that.

15:05 Mark: Whereas I see this as reflecting why religious folks jumped on this, that unlike Jasper's saying that it's just tautologies that invite you to thrust your spiritual being on. No, it's that he's telling you that everything you think you know is wrong and in fact calling you names. So he's gaslighting you and then saying you're double headed because you don't see it. So this is the way that it more closely resembles the religion I'm familiar with.

15:28 Peter: At least it goes back to something we were talking about. If he tells you to revise all your beliefs in such a radical way, why should you listen to him? And I think in a way when Plato says in the Sophist, I can't explain this, we're going to appeal to difference rather than non being. I think that's actually the best way to engage with Parmenides and maybe the way he wanted you to engage with him. Because I think that if someone gives you an argument, a rational argument for abandoning everything you believe, then although you might not immediately abandon everything you believe, that doesn't seem to be a reasonable response actually.

But on the other hand, it doesn't seem to be a reasonable response to say, well, you're telling me to abandon everything I believe, so I ignore you. You rather you should do what Dylan suggested, which is figure out what needs to be revised. Right. So you should try to find what's wrong with the argument if it leads to a conclusion that you feel you can't accept, but you shouldn't just ignore it.

16:18 Wes: So I remembered what Tallis was saying. He credits atomism as coming out of this and I think we saw that in one of the commentaries as well, where you could be Parmenidean but somehow become a pluralist about these spherical undifferentiated beings. I'm not sure exactly how that happened.

16:35 Peter: That's exactly right. So I think what happened is that Democritus and Leucippus, the first atomists, they said, ah, Parmenides is right, except non being is real, it's void, it's just empty space. That's non being. And in fact they even use the Greek meon, non being, that's void. They also call it to kenon, the empty. What the atomists do is they precisely say if we integrate non being in the form of empty space or void into our ontology, maybe we shouldn't talk about empty space, actually, because space is a kind of loaded word. But if we add void to the cosmology, we don't just have this one sphere, we're going to be able to have differentiations, we're going to have lots of different things that can't be cut atom, obviously it means not cuttable atoma, things that cannot be cut.

So actually they're very much like Parmenides sphere. They're not necessarily spherical, they may have all kinds of different shapes, but they're not divided or divisible. They can't be cut into parts, and they're homogeneous within themselves, just like Parmenides sphere. But because we've added or allowed a certain kind of non being into our world, namely void, we're now able to have pluralism. So we're able to have many, many atoms, in fact, maybe even infinite number of atoms, and then they can combine to make up the world that we see around us.

And maybe another sign that the atomists are close to Parmenides in spirit is that arguably they're also very prone to revising common sense. So there's this fragment of Democritus that goes something like by convention sweet, by convention bitter, but in reality atoms and void. So in other words, all the everyday properties we associate with or we impute to things around us are in some way an illusion or mere convention, because the underlying reality is mere atoms and voids. So it's just being and non being instead of only being, which is what you get in Parmenides.

18:20 Wes: Very well put. I wanted to make one more connection to German idealism because again, some of the similarities are remarkable and is one of my avenues for trying to understand this, because what's interesting is after Kant, I think, in the tradition with Fichte and others, you get people questioning, well, what are the things in themselves? And I think Fichte basically says, well, it's other souls, essentially, it's other transcendental egos. I guess Fichte goes farther than that. But anyway, at some point with Hegel, well, it's all just one big soul.

There's no way to distinguish between one soul and another, and then that becomes the world. But somewhere along the way there, there's this regression to what seems more like a Leibnizian monadology, where you have all these atoms, but they are spiritual atoms. So there's a subjectivity associated with each one of them. And my inclination, as we move into the way of belief, the way of seeming, right, my inclination is in the way that a realm of experience is associated with each of Leibniz's monads, monads corresponding to human beings or associated with a world spirit, let's say in Hegel, this way of belief or way of seeming is sort of the subjective counterpart to the substantial whole, which I know on its face is probably an illegitimate way to interpret Parmenides since he's denying this realm.

But anyway, again, I look at this distinction between the way of truth and the way of belief as something like the distinction between thing in itself and then the world of appearance or representation.

19:45 Dylan: But I think, Wes, that's the way you would save his monadology. His being is one and being is everything and still get appearance out of it. Is, if the appearances in some ways are riding on top of being, how

19:57 Wes: do we get appearance? Like, how is it that we are deluded at all? How do we have subjectivity in this

20:03 Peter: picture, something Mark mentioned before. How is Parmenides telling us this? And how are we having a conversation about it?

20:10 Dylan: Yes, yeah.

20:11 Peter: In fact, this is a move that Plato often makes. He says, if you come to me with a philosophical theory, which implies that you are not able to present philosophical theories or that you can't believe anything or whatever. So, for example, if you're a relativist and you say, well, relativism is true, but I think all truths are relative, then obviously you can say, well, what about the claim that all truth is relative? Is that relative? If it's only true for you, then who cares? Right? And there's a similar problem here which I think lurks throughout the Way of Truth, because he doesn't deny the reality of the mind, right.

Or the subject, who's inquiring and trying to figure out what's going on with being and trying to understand what being is to the contrary. He says, well, here's what you can think. You can think about being, but who's doing the thinking? Is it being, thinking about itself? Well, maybe because there's nothing else to do the thinking, right? But then it seems like you, since you're thinking about it, are somehow yourself being identified with being, which is quite strange. And so you wonder, when he talks about the way of truth versus the way of opinion, is he contrasting being's correct way of thinking about itself to being's erroneous way of thinking about itself?

Then we have two ways of thinking, which is a difference, and there can't be any such thing as difference. There's a lot of paradoxes that come in once you start really taking it seriously. The idea that Being is an object of mental cognitive grasp as well as just something he's kind of describing as a sphere with no holes and it.

21:36 Mark: Let's proceed in the text. The next line is very much related to this. I'll just read my translation. The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same. For you cannot find thought without something that is as to which it is uttered. So it sounds like he's saying right there, the thought and the thing that the thought is about, those are the same. Which, of course, if he's a monist and everything is the same as everything else, then it would just follow from that. But, like, why pick that out in particular then? Some people have interpreted him that he's an idealist. So what do you guys make of this?

22:07 Peter: So I think he's saying something we've sort of touched on before, which is that being is the only possible object of thought here. I think all he says is that being and the reality of being is the precondition for the possibility of thought. But what he doesn't explain is where the thought comes from, or who does the mind belong to, whose job it is to think about thought. Like I say, it kind of seems like it must be being that's thinking about itself. So you could almost think it's sort of like God grasping himself in Aristotle. But on the other hand, there's also us as the hearers or readers of the poem.

Or actually remember that in the fictional setting the goddess is declaring this to Parmenides. A clever thing that Parmenides does, so that if we imagine the poem was written to be read aloud, then within the poem there's the goddess declaiming truth to Parmenides. And then in real life, Parmenides would be standing there in front of you declaiming TR truth to you. In a way, you're almost forced to wonder about this paradoxical question. Namely, if you're telling me the truth and I'm listening, then I must be different from you. And we're both thinking about it, and yet you're telling me there's only one thing.

And you haven't told me how this one thing can think about itself, never mind be both the thing that is teaching and the thing that is being taught. So it's actually very difficult to figure out how Parmenides's monism makes it possible to express or think about or teach the truth of monism. And I guess that that's true of a lot of monist philosophical systems. So Spinoza, Vedanta, all these monist theories in the history of philosophy, they often run up against the problem that it's very difficult for them to express their own theory without seeming to lapse into self contradiction or undercutting the possibility of even presenting a theory.

23:51 Mark: The Kirk, Raven, Schofield translation I was trying to find of the same line, the same thing is there to be thought and is why there is thought.

23:59 Peter: Thought.

23:59 Mark: So that's not quite the same thing as saying the thought and the object of thought are the same. The thing is there to be thought. So that's the object of thought and why there is thought. So why there is thought seems different than the thought itself is the precondition of the thought, as you're saying. So that sounds less like idealism and more like what you're saying, that being is a precondition of thought.

24:20 Peter: Yeah, the beginning. He just says, and noein is the verb. Verb is an infinitive. It just means to think. So to think is the same thing. And there is that which is thought, or something like that. That would be very literal translation. You can see why people don't do literal translations, right? Because it doesn't sound like it means anything at all.

24:39 Mark: Well, that sounded more idealistic than the version I just gave.

24:42 Peter: Like I said before, it's such compressed Greek that to translate it you almost have to expand it into different interpretations. And that might be already the beginning of something we've been talking about the whole time, which is that there are so many different ways of reading Parmenides. I mean, literally, there are many different ways of reading Parmenides, because if you read it in Greek, you have to somehow make sense of it. And already in doing that, you're importing certain interpretations into the text. And maybe that's true of every philosophical text, but it's more true of Parmenides than almost any other piece of philosophy.

25:13 Mark: The next part is about the sphere, which we've already discussed, so we don't necessarily need to.

25:17 Peter: Yeah, maybe we should skip to the transition to the way of opinion.

25:20 Mark: Yeah.

25:21 Peter: Do you want me to read that part?

25:22 Mark: Yeah, sure, go ahead.

25:24 Peter: So this is a quotation from Simplicius. He says, Parmenides affects the transition from the objects of reason to the objects of sense, or as he himself puts it, from truth to opinion. When he writes, here I end my trustworthy discourse and thought concerning truth, henceforth learn the beliefs of mortal men listening to the deceitful ordering of my words. And then he apparently also went on to say, it is proper that you should learn all things, both the unshaken heart of well rounded truth and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true reliance.

But nonetheless you shall learn these things too. How what is believed would have to be assuredly pervading all things throughout. I should say that their translation there, how what is believed would have to be assuredly is even more interpretive than usual because they put in that would have to be, which you don't really need to take from the Greek. So I think the important thing is that he uses the words ta dokounta, which means things that seem or things that appear. So he's making a contrast between what he's just told you, which which is true and reliable and what he's about to tell us next in the way of opinion, which is just the way things seem to be.

So this is the way of opinion, like Wes was saying earlier, it seems to be the realm of appearances. And then he's going to try to explain all the ways that things appear to us in light of this duality of principles, light and dark, which combine to give us things like the heavens and the earth and the human body and so on, which a lot of

26:48 Mark: the same issues come up here that came up when we were discussing Kant on appearance versus reality, that for the one thing, can you say anything positive from Kant's perspective? We know appearance, we don't know reality. Can you say anything positive about reality? Well, Schopenhauer said, yeah, okay, if there's plurality in appearance, then there must not be plurality in reality. He was very positive and had a more Parmenidean view. I think Kant was often more non committal, rightly so, about what the in itself is, because you don't know. It's not appearance.

But like Parmenides, insofar as you can know anything about it, there are certain ways that you could use reason, practical reason or something to figure out some general output outlines, you know, at least it has to be the thing that shows up as appearances. That's at least one of the comparisons there. The other one I saw was just the fact that it seems like appearance is just the surface layer. But yet if we say the whole world of science is within the world of appearance, well then there's a lot of hidden stuff in the world of appearance, right?

There's a lot of regularities and generalities. And you can talk about atoms as part of the world of appearance. At least scientists do. Now, on the Kantian view of science, if you're a Kantian about science, you don't think you're actually talking about reality, you're just talking about non obvious layers of appearance. And likewise in here it seems strange that I'm talking about just the world of appearance and everything is made up of light and night. Like that doesn't look like everything's made up of light and night. That's a pretty serious analysis.

You're delving in to appearance and giving it some hard to argue for interpretation to break it down in that way.

28:10 Peter: Yeah, I think that's a great point. So there's two paradoxical things that happen here. One is, he says, okay, now listen to the rest of my poem in which I'm going to say a lot of things that aren't true. Listen to the deceitful ordering of my words. So like, what's up with that? Because even Kant, when he says what? Well here's the world of appearance, he doesn't say so don't believe any of it. It's mere appearance, it's just an illusion. That's not the point Kant is trying to make. He's just saying that there may be a difference between the way things are in themselves and the way they appear to us.

Whereas Parmenides says, okay, now I'm going to tell you about the world of appearance and everything I'm going to say is false because what's true is the way of truth. So that's one paradox. And the other paradox is that what he goes on to say is not a description of the way things actually seem seen. It's a counterintuitive explanation of things that appear to us, namely in terms of these fundamental principles of light and dark.

28:58 Mark: Most of the interpretations that we've read seem to say, you know, it may be that certain things about this because it's a series of concentric spheres. So okay, well it's a sphere just like the world of reality was. So there's some overlap maybe, I think, was it the Stanford Encyclopedia article was saying that the world of appearance and the world of reality are, are not co. Substantial. Right? They're not the same substance, but they are coterminous, they have coincident boundaries. So just like we said, the world of reality according to Parmenides really is a sphere.

Well, the world of appearance is that same sphere, the same outer boundary, although we don't want to call it outer, but it's the same boundary you would eventually hit. But everything, all the details besides that are different. So it's just like in the Eucharist, the bread and Jesus body are Maybe this is a disanalogy, but they are the same substance, even though they have all different properties.

29:55 Peter: I love it when people try to clarify something by bringing in the Eucharist. Always a good move.

30:04 Mark: Well, yeah, okay. So this is one. It has different properties, the world of appearance and the world of reality. And it has a different substance. We don't want to say that the one is the same substance as all these scattered many, but it's one level more removed from that in their sameness that they're coterminate. It seemed helpful to me at the time when I read that when we

30:25 Dylan: were talking about this at the very beginning, there was a distinction we made between whether or not in the world of appearance, light and dark, whether they were two different kinds of being that were opposites. So that dark was genuinely the non being of. Of light, or if that darkness was the privation of light. And it seemed to me that those two things were different. In Parmenides poem, it seems like the former, that dark is set up as an opposite, that is in some ways a non being being, as opposed to being simply a privation.

31:02 Peter: Maybe you could even say that it's the closest thing you could get to having an opposition of non being and being, where non being is not taken super seriously as utter non being.

31:14 Dylan: Yes.

31:14 Peter: So we've got light and then its kind of negative counterpart, its opposite. But it's still got enough content to be a kind of spurious explanatory principle. So it can interact sort of like dualist or Gnosticism. Right. So you have these interacting opposed principles. And it can't be an accident that darkness is so close to being. The notion of non being as a very negative opposite sort of notion. So I think it's almost like in the way of opinion, he moves just one little step away from the way of truth, and then he can get the whole cosmos back just by making that little step.

31:52 Dylan: Yeah, because he immediately gets distinction. As soon as you have a lever of distinction of any sort, then you can quickly just unfurl the world of appearances.

32:01 Peter: And maybe what he's also trying to do here is say there's a lot of different opinions you could have about cosmology. Like where does the world come from? How does everything work? This, by the way, was apparently a very, very detailed long part of the poem. Like it even got into things like embryology, although we don't have most of that material anymore.

32:22 Mark: On the right boys, on the left girls. That's what we have.

32:25 Peter: One of his greatest hits And I think that perhaps one way of understanding what he's doing here is he's saying, well, if you're going to give this kind of presocratic cosmology, then at least do it in a way that's as close as possible to the way of truth by allowing something like non being in there, and then you've got your opposition and then you're up and running. But in other words, I think he might still say, well, I have preferences between different kinds of false stories. There's really false ones and there's minimally false ones. And I'm giving you the minimally false false one.

33:00 Dylan: It makes sense to me that the way of belief would be close to the way of truth for kind of consistency's sake, you know, like the whole goal of the poem would be to keep you as close to the path of the goddess as you can. But the way you just described it is that it doesn't seem like a little bit of non being has to exist. It seems like an awful lot of non being has to exist.

33:26 Peter: Yeah, but I mean, if you contrast what he does here to allowing in a multitude of principles like the four elements or something like that, all you have is a principle and its counterpart, which is defined in opposition to it, light and dark, then you have to at least do that. You have to move that far away from the truth to explain the world of appearances. But you don't have to move further than that. It's a very small move. So in a way, I think it's almost like he's saying, well, if I make this minimal concession, then I can give you a cosmology of the type that other pre Socratics were trying to give.

And mine is better because it's at least as close as possible to the way of truth. So it's like he's outdoing them twice. He's got a better story because he's got the way of truth. And then he's also got a false way of opinion which is still truer than the other opinions that are floating around out there. So I think there's something that maybe is true. True of Greek philosophy in general and pre Socratic philosophy in particular is, I think there's a lot of competition and attempt to outdo each other. And you know, oh, you say everything is changing, then I say nothing changes.

Right? You say there's no non being. Well, I say there is because I'm an atomist. And that may be part of what's going on here is a kind of competition between him and other people who have given similar also poetic accounts of nature.

34:45 Mark: I have a quote here from Sedley from Cambridge. He really emphasizes it's just enters one little extra item and you jumped from the truth to the cosmology of seeming. And he says of the dualism, page 124. Can we say whether the illicit second element corresponding to what is not is light or night? Aristotle and Theophrastus took it to be night, but their supposition may be conditioned by the too familiar symbolism whereby light represents truth and reality. Modern scholarship has shown that this is not Parmenides use of light imagery. Indeed, in the poem, his allegorical journey is from the light light into the house of night. This lends additional credibility to Karl Popper's proposal that light, the element that par excellence informs the senses, is the intruder.

35:27 Peter: That's clever.

35:29 Mark: So just if you're. If you're wondering what is the foreign element, maybe it's not darkness. It's always the. The bad one.

35:34 Peter: Okay, well, I'm always willing to be corrected by David Sedley.

35:40 Mark: I can't think of anything that actually hangs on that other than we need more positive images of blackness in the Parmenides in interpretive media. So there you go.

35:51 Peter: So first of all, I would like to say that I really enjoyed talking about that with you guys. It was a lot of fun.

35:55 Wes: Yeah, thanks for coming on.

35:56 Dylan: Yeah, thanks for coming on.

35:57 Peter: I always thought about your podcast as the competition, but now I'll think of you as the friendly competition. And so just as a final thought about Parmenides, I think that, well, there's a lot of exciting things about him, but maybe what's most exciting about him him is the boldness with which he takes a rational argument really seriously. So he follows it through to what he thinks are its conclusions. And he says, well, if this is where reason leads, then I'm going to follow. And if it undercuts everything that everybody believes about the entire world, so be it.

And as we've been saying before, the response that that should provoke it shouldn't be to make fun of it or to just reject it out of hand without thinking about it, but to figure out what went wrong, if something went wrong. And I think it's actually in light of that is interesting that it's almost like he says, well, here's my plan B, like the way of opinion, right? So he almost allows himself to suppose that perhaps things aren't quite as radical as he. He's just said. And even though his Official story is definitely that there's the way of truth and the way of opinion.

The way of opinion is false. It's really interesting that he went to the trouble to give apparently what was a very detailed Greek poem about cosmology, which is the second part of his overall poem. And so I think we have to take that seriously. And it's really a shame that we don't have more of it preserved today because it probably would have given us a better idea of what he was up to as a thinker.

37:33 Wes: Yeah, it's just yet another podcast, which I expected not to be so interested because I don't know the pre Socratics. It just brings up negative associations for me, especially given my time at UT and the ancient philosophy specialization that I started out in, because it just seemed very boring. But it's not. So I was pleasantly surprised. And as usual, I'm always kind of seduced by these weird, crazy systems, these metaphysical systems, like Leibniz, for instance. I like it when it gets weird because it's an attempt and almost like a scientific model, it's an attempt to give a ontology, let's say, that explains things.

But it's so out there. I enjoy it whether one can't take any of it literally, but I find it to be informative because, you know, ultimately, as we saw, it gets at this question of the relationship between representation and being, how we account for becoming and change and things like that, which are still, I think, difficult metaphysical questions. And it gives you one sort of departure point for thinking about all that stuff.

38:40 Dylan: For me, reading Parmenides is like being reminded about how you start out and those first questions you have about what makes things different, are there different things in the world? If things are different from one another other, how can they be the same? And you end up with, as Peter was saying in west too, is you impermenides. You get somebody just throws down the line, throws down the gauntlet, says, well, it's all one thing. And on the face of it, you think it's going to be easier than it is to dismiss it. But the more you think about it, the more it becomes harder to dismiss it.

Which is interesting, right? There's 150 lines here, but you have have all the greatest hits of philosophers end up thinking about Parmenides a lot. So doing the podcast and on it and reading it and realizing, well, yeah, you actually have to think about it pretty hard. All that said, I find it a beginning, and so it's rich in that way. But I immediately want to go to other things that following what we were talking about earlier, that there's a kind of rational conclusion that you get out of him. And then I immediately want to go to, well, okay, so there's something that isn't quite working on that, which to me makes the fact that there is this whole way of belief section of the poem that comes after the way of truth that's tied to it really, really interesting and make me appreciate and like Parmenides even more because in some ways there being kind of a crack in the whole story, there's some kind of inquiry going on.

Even though he has the way of truth, the fact that the way of belief is there at the end means that there's an inquiry going on still.

40:24 Wes: The world as sphere and representation. I just wanted to reiterate my claim that I really think this is all about nominalism. I think Parmenides is a nominalist. I think he's worried about the problem of universals and what happens if you allow into the picture conceptual apparatus for which there's no corresponding particular. So we can only talk about particulars. And the next step is to say, well, we can only really talk about one big particular. Coming to that. The process by which I came to that conclusion was really informative for me. I may be wrong about that. I couldn't find anything about that in the literature or online or anything, and it surprises me, but that was sort of my purchase on things.

41:09 Mark: So when I was thinking about how we were going to do this episode, one of the reasons that it was was delayed for so long is I knew we couldn't just read the fragments, that that would be disastrous. So I was looking, is there a book, is there a guess that we could have that was like what Eva Brann did for us, for Heraclitus, that gives, you know, a unified philosophical picture of what this is really about. And instead, you know, I've been wanting to have Peter on for a long time and he had done a pretty good episode on this and he had some suggestions in terms of what secondary literature to go.

So, you know, just doing, doing this, we're all just going to read a bunch of secondary literature to get a sense of what the different interpretations are. I ended up finding that a somewhat more satisfying, I think, picture. And I really want to encourage people to look at the show notes for this. I'm going to link to some things. So, for instance, the Stanford Encyclopedia article sort of goes through here are the basic different types of interpretations. Most of those we referred to in Some ways here, but we haven't been very systematic about marching through them.

Them. So if you want, you know, a refresher or get a little concrete, take a look at that. Another one is this. Alexander Mourelatos was one of the profs at UT that some of us had. He has this 1979 essay, Some Alternatives in Interpreting Parmenides, which I guess is a shortened version of a 1970 thing that he. He had written on it. And that's where I think this version of Could Parmenides be a pluralist? Like where he's really talking, saying there are multiple beings, but it's just that for each being, it is necessarily what it is. Something like that, you know, saying something, what it is to authentically be a being at all.

And I think that to really make that clear, actually, you need more than what was in Mourelatos's short paper, at least that we read. But I found that very intriguing. And another one of the things he referred to in trying to say, look, this is not just about the problem of negative existential. He really wanted to take account of the entirety of the poem, not just the middle part, and talk about, you know, how it was related to the beginning and the end. And one of the images that he used was we were asking what's outside the sphere? And you could think that the issue is not so much that there is just a sphere, a single sphere and nothing outside of it, and, you know, not even void outside of it, but that there is nothing definite outside of it.

So that Mourelatos's take about the verb is, is. The choices are not just the existential is and the predicative is, is green or whatever, but is definitely and essentially like that's what makes something a being. And then everything outside of that. You can't speak of it because it's indefinite. It's not that it doesn't exist. It's that it is not something you can actually point your finger at. And he. He used this. I'll just give you a quote here. In Homer, the sea is called boundless precisely because it is unstructured and because it lies outside islands which are bounded and beyond the shores which are boundaries.

This Homeric contrast of an island against the boundless sea may well count as an aptly Parmenidean image of the contrast between what is and what is not. So there might be ways to take these ideas that are not so. I was going to say so so crazy. But I. I think we've already in just in. Wes is taking this as he's giving a version of Kant. And there are all ways we've even discussed of not just seeing him as a monist in a way that, you know, at least anybody who's not very religious is probably not going to want to admit that they're underlyingly, this is the most obvious way that it went through Plato.

And yeah, God is the single one thing, and all the visible stuff is just aspects of it, the aspectualist view. So definitely a lot of interesting fodder here. You know, ways forward on this, I had considered including Zeno and Melissus in here. That's actually the following episode. There's another short one that Peter gives in his podcast on those two. Potentially we'll do those at some point. What we had planned doing next is actually the Platonic dialogue Parmenides for next time, which, according to Peter, really doesn't tell you much about the historical Parmenides.

But I think we will have better consciences having this under our belt before touching that more famous dialogue. The closing song for this episode is called Circle by Gareth Mitchell. I interviewed him about this very song on Nakedly Examined Music, episode four. Check that out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com well, Peter, we are so happy to have you on here. I'm very impressed on how on the ball with this material, given that you covered it in your podcast seven years ago, eight years ago at this point. And I hope we can get you back to, you know, talk about some Arabic philosophy or Indian philosophy, you know, one of these other things that we've unfairly neglected anytime.

45:53 Wes: Yeah.

45:54 Peter: Thanks again.

45:54 Wes: Thanks, Peter.

45:55 Peter: Thanks.

45:55 Mark: All right, folks should tell us what they want to hear. Do you want to hear more Presocratics? Do you want us to get the hell off any weird abstract topics like this and get back to politics? Go comment@PartiallyExaminedLife.com on the blog post corresponding to this episode or on our Facebook group tweet at us, et cetera, et cetera. Email us at pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com Bye bye, everybody. Thanks. Good night.

46:19 Peter: Good night.