Rose Cherubin

In the fragments of Parmenides, a goddess tells a human of the "roads of inquiry there are for conceiving", and rehearses arguments to show why to eon must be said and taken to be a certain way, on or for an apparently viable road of inquiry. These arguments invoke ike, nanke, and oi ra--roughly, ustice, ecessity, and air Portion--as binding to eon. There is no evidence that the goddess speaks of how to eon might be independent of inquiry, or across all contexts. ;I show that in order for inquiry to be possible, to eon must be taken to be as the goddess says it must on or for that last road of inquiry; and that ike, nanke, and oi ra as understood in the fifth century BCE can be seen to bind to eon to be that way. Paradoxes arise from this, in that what is needed in order to conduct an inquiry and in order to make the arguments the goddess does are incompatible with the way to eon must be taken to be in or for inquiry . I investigate why these paradoxes arise, whether they can be resolved or avoided, and what their significance is with regard to inquiry and to its results. ;I then examine the metaphysical and epistemological ramifications of Parmenides' fragments as thus elucidated, discussing implications for the possibility of inquiry, for conceptions of what is inquired into or sought, and for what inquiry may tell us. I show how the poetic form of the fragments reflects and illuminates these implications, and explore the roles of the human and the divine figures in the fragments. It can thus be seen that this comprehensive approach to the fragments provides a coherent reading of them in a way that others of more limited scope do not. Finally I look at the significance of the posing of inquiry as a problem

On the road of inquiry that Parmenides’ goddess recommends, one is to say and conceive that what-is is one, unmoving, continuous, ungenerated, undestroyed, complete, and undivided. Yet the goddess’s arguments in favor of this road use negations, distinctions, divisions, and references to generation and destruction. The requisites of inquiry that she outlines are both defined on and at odds with other features that inquiry appears to require. This essay argues that the goddess’s arguments manifest something like a liar paradox: She demonstrates on the basis of the opinions of mortals that mortals’ opinions are flawed. If so, then the goddess’s arguments do not establish that what-is is one and unchanging. What they show is that what inquiry and inference seem to require, given the opinions of mortals, is at odds with itself. To refer to what-is is to make aletheia impossible to reach. To be mortal, for Parmenides, is to journey through that incompleteness.

The goddess’s speech in Parmenides’s fragments is framed by the opinions of mortals in at least two ways. First, the journey of the proem starts in the world described by mortals’ opinions, and the second part of the goddess’s speech explores those opinions. Second, throughout her speech, the goddess invokes features of the world according to mortals’ opinions—negation, coming-to-be, destruction—even when she is arguing for a road of inquiry that excludes those features. Further, we study the fragments by means of the definitions and claims regarding what-is that we use to function and communicate in our mortal lives. This paper proposes to approach the fragments with an awareness of this framing. A result is that the logical conclusion of accepting mortals’ opinions is that mortals’ opinions are flawed; and that result is based on flawed opinions. The goddess’s account thus presents something like a Liar Paradox.

This paper comments on Anna Marmodoro’s “Stoic Blends.” That essay argues that the “Eleatic Principle” is central to Stoic conceptions of what is. It also investigates a key difference between Stoic and Aristotelian conceptions of the roles of form and matter in constituting what is: the Stoics’ insistence that form and matter are bodies, and their concomitant assertion that more than one independent body can occupy the exact same place. The present comment explores the relationships between the “Eleatic Principle,” the arguments of the historical Eleatics, and Aristotle’s hylomorphism.