Parmenides

Parmenides of Elea (5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the Southern coast of Italy. He is reported to have been a student of Xenophanes. He is one of the most significant of the pre-Socratic philosophers. He argued that the every-day perception of reality of the physical world (The Way of Seeming) is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is 'One Being' (the Way of Truth): an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole.

Metaphysics

His work On Nature exists only in fragments and is made up of two parts as well as an introductory discourse. The Way of Truth discusses that which is real and the Way of Seeming discusses that which is illusory. Under the Way of Truth, he stated that there are two ways of inquiry: that it is, that it is not. He said that the latter argument is never feasible because nothing can not be and be an object of speech and thought:

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:For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are.

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:Thinking and the thought that it is are the same; for you will not find thought apart from what is, in relation to which it is uttered.

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:For thought and being are the same.

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:It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not.

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:Helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts; they are carried along deaf and blind alike, dazed, beasts without judgment, convinced that to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and that the road of all things is a backward-turning one.

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Furthermore, he implied that it could not have "come into being" because "nothing comes from nothing."

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Moreover he argued that movement was impossible because it requires moving into "the void", and Parmenides identified "the void" with nothing, and therefore (by definition) it does not exist. That which does exist is The Parmenidean One which is timeless, uniform, and unchanging:

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:How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown.

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:Nor was once, nor will be, since is, now, all together, / One, continuous; for what coming-to-be of it will you seek? / In what way, whence, did grow? Neither from what-is-not shall I allow / You to say or think; for it is not to be said or thought / That is not. And what need could have impelled it to grow / Later or sooner, if it began from nothing? Thus must either be completely or not at all.

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: is now, all at once, one and continuous... Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is.

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:And it is all one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again.

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