Eleaticism

A movement in 5th century BC Greek thought stemming from Parmenides of Elea (in southern Italy) and his two main disciples Zeno of Elea (not the Stoic) and Melissus of Samos.

The main tenet was an insistence that any kind of change was impossible, and so (on the usual interpretation) was any kind of plurality. Reality was one and unchanging, and the changing multiplicity of things was an illusion.

The arguments used appealed to strict logic, and were the first to do so systematically; Zeno in particular produced a number of paradoxes which plurality and change involve.

The Eleatics’ main influence – especially on their contemporaries and on Plato a century later – took the form of an insistence that whatever is ultimately real must be permanent and unchanging except for moving in space, and this influence can still be felt in philosophers like Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

Also see: monism

Source:
W K C Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 2 (1965)

History

The school took its name from Elea (Ancient Greek: Ἐλέα), a Greek city of lower Italy, the home of its chief exponents, Parmenides and Zeno. Its foundation is often attributed to Xenophanes of Colophon, but, although there is much in his speculations which formed part of the later Eleatic doctrine, it is probably more correct to regard Parmenides as the founder of the school.^[2]

Parmenides developed some of Xenophanes’s metaphysical ideas, developing Xenophanes’ spirit of free thought. Subsequently, the school debated the possibility of motion and other such fundamental questions. The work of the school was influential upon Platonic metaphysics.^[2]

Philosophy

The Eleatics rejected the epistemological validity of sense experience, and instead took logical standards of clarity and necessity to be the criteria of truth. Of the members, Parmenides and Melissus built arguments starting from sound premises. Zeno, on the other hand, primarily employed the reductio ad absurdum, attempting to destroy the arguments of others by showing that their premises led to contradictions (Zeno’s paradoxes).^{[citation needed]}

The main doctrines of the Eleatics were evolved in opposition to the theories of the early physicalist philosophers, who explained all existence in terms of primary matter, and to the theory of Heraclitus, which declared that all existence may be summed up as perpetual change. The Eleatics maintained that the true explanation of things lies in the conception of a universal unity of being. According to their doctrine, the senses cannot cognize this unity, because their reports are inconsistent; it is by thought alone that we can pass beyond the false appearances of sense and arrive at the knowledge of being, at the fundamental truth that the “All is One”. Furthermore, there can be no creation, for being cannot come from non-being, because a thing cannot arise from that which is different from it. They argued that errors on this point commonly arise from the ambiguous use of the verb to be, which may imply actual physical existence or be merely the linguistic copula which connects subject and predicate.^[2]

Though the Eleatic school ended with Melissus of Samos (fl. c. 450 BC), and conclusions of the Eleatics were rejected by the later Presocratics and Aristotle, their arguments were taken seriously, and they are generally credited with improving the standards of discourse and argument in their time. Their influence was likewise long-lasting; Gorgias, a Sophist, argued in the style of the Eleatics in On Nature or What Is Not, and Plato acknowledged them in the Parmenides, the Sophist and the Statesman. Furthermore, much of the later philosophy of the ancient period borrowed from the methods and principles of the Eleatics.^[