Pyrrho & Nestor seem to be resting up from their debate. Hardly surprising, given how difficult Parmenides alone is, much less any differences he might have had with Heraclitus. Parmenides, known only through his fragmentary poem and through Plato's namesake dialogue, is a pretty tough nut to crack. As long ago as 1894, William Waddell was warning students not to read Hegel into Parmenides, and it seems the propensity for surjecting modernisms has continued down to our century. I'll only guess that a little earlier the students were being tempted to read Kant into him as well.
It's enough to discourage me: Abstractions regarding the nature of reality from 2500 years ago are the hardest things to translate with modern equivalents when it's possible no close equivalents exist. We had Zeno's paradox of the arrow arguing that motion or change can't be real when obviously Zeno must have seen arrows in flight. What were these fellas really talking about? It's clear Parmenides distinguished nonverbal perception from construction with words (logos), considering the former unreliable, yet beyond that I'm not schooled enough to tell what he planned to accomplish with his philosophical program. Plato then superimposes a new agenda, to establish a form of dualism, by having Socrates rebut another of Zeno's premises, that things cannot be simultaneously "like" and "unlike." That's about the best I can do with it.
Waddell 1894 ed. of Plato Parmenides, see p. 6 (13 in pdf), in the Preface
http://www.wilbourhall.org/pdfs/plato/th..._plato.pdf
It's enough to discourage me: Abstractions regarding the nature of reality from 2500 years ago are the hardest things to translate with modern equivalents when it's possible no close equivalents exist. We had Zeno's paradox of the arrow arguing that motion or change can't be real when obviously Zeno must have seen arrows in flight. What were these fellas really talking about? It's clear Parmenides distinguished nonverbal perception from construction with words (logos), considering the former unreliable, yet beyond that I'm not schooled enough to tell what he planned to accomplish with his philosophical program. Plato then superimposes a new agenda, to establish a form of dualism, by having Socrates rebut another of Zeno's premises, that things cannot be simultaneously "like" and "unlike." That's about the best I can do with it.
Waddell 1894 ed. of Plato Parmenides, see p. 6 (13 in pdf), in the Preface
http://www.wilbourhall.org/pdfs/plato/th..._plato.pdf
