He is one of the first philosophers of the rationalism tradition in ancient Greek philosophy. With Parmenides, philosophy has started to become a metaphysics and ontology from being a nature philosophy.
Parmenides was born in 515-445 BC in Elea, a Greek colonial city in the south of Italy at that time (Today's Izmir Foça), as the son of a noble and wealthy family. Because of his activity in the Elea region, we will call the school he founded, the Elea School, where he spread Elea philosophy and teachings, and which he also founded. Elean philosophy, in certain lines, is the continuation of the Pythagorean school as an idea. Parmenides, the founder of this school, was together with Ameinias, one of Pythagoras' students, for a long time, so much so that he became so attached to this extremely poor but mature man that he had a tomb built after his death. Although the founder and most important name of the Elea School are Parmenides, we can consider Xenophanes, who brought the idea of monotheism to philosophy for the first time, as the father of the Elea School.
Although Parmenides was not a student of Xenophanes, he listened to his lectures and met with him. Again, he has diametrically opposite views from his contemporary Heraclitus. While Heraclitus said "everything changes", Parmenides said "nothing changes". Again, closing the door to the oppositions that form the basis of Heraclitus' philosophy is to say that there are no contradictions. Parmenides was a rationalist, and he distinguished very radically between rational and logical knowledge and empirical knowledge. The only interlocutor of knowledge is the mind and he had the understanding that he did not receive any data from experience, namely empiricism, and was based only on logical reasoning. For example, cold means not only hot. Darkness is not just light. Because every type of knowledge based on senses and experiences is only a conjecture at best, which can be the opposite of truth at most. We can say that Parmenides, who put his whole philosophy on this foundation, is the first philosopher in the history of philosophy to distinguish between truth and opinion so sharply.
After the Parmenides-Heraclitus conflict, philosophy will take a new path, and the problem of being-being and the relations between these two phenomena will be the main problem of philosophy. In the time of Parmenides, it was necessary to have some opportunities to be able to philosophize, Parmenides, who came from an aristocratic family, undoubtedly had these opportunities. Parmenides, who was also a statesman and legislator, was highly respected by his compatriots for his fair administration, and great officials swore each year that they would abide by the laws he had set for his city. Parmenides, who came from an aristocratic family, was not discussed in Elea because he was thought to have some knowledge and divine inspiration that other mortals did not know, and his existence prevented a similar conflict between aristocrats and democrats in Southern Italy, which was going on in the Greek country at the same time. . After a point, he devoted himself completely to philosophy and went to Athens in a near old age. Even today, in many sources, it is said that he met and argued with Socrates in Athens, but this is not possible because Socrates was not yet born when Parmenides went to Athens.
PARMENIDES PHILOSOPHY
MATTER IS Eternal and Eternal!
Like the philosophers who focused on the problem of existence before Parmenides and said that the existing is something existing, Parmenides also caught this point, but as a distinct difference, there were some points of agreement in the thoughts of the philosophers before Parmenides.
THERE IS NO CHANGE IN THE UNIVERSE!
The main claim of Parmenides is that these three premises put forward by the philosophers before him cannot be true at the same time, and if they are considered true at the same time, there is a contradiction. According to Parmenides; If everything is eternal, nothing disappears from existence and does not come into existence out of anything, if what is called change is that something disappears and becomes something new, then there is no such thing as change. Because the intermediate premise here and the conclusion are inconsistent. As it can be understood, Parmenides presents logical thinking, and while revealing this, he does not set out from the experiment but presents an argumentative thought by acting with logic. He refutes the thoughts of the philosophers before him with their own basic assumptions. Parmenides does not stay with this logical argument, but goes to the second argument and asks: If everything is "one", how will this one multiply? Because, according to Parmenides, it is impossible to derive "many" from "one".
For a clearer understanding, let us list the main arguments of Parmenides as follows:
1) Everything is eternal and eternal. Being does not come from anything, and non-existence does not come from being.
2) Everything is “one” and there is only “one”. Therefore:
3) There is no change. The "one" here is a sphere. It is nothing like earth, air, water, or fire.