Parmenides - the Philosophy of Being

oh and welcome back to Solomon's cave I hope you're sitting down because in this video I'll be tackling one of the most profound thoughts ever put forward by any philosopher this is Parmenides and the philosophy of being Parmenides lived somewhere between 5:15 and 445 BC that is after the Malaysians and together with Zeno phonus he bridges the gap between pythagoras and socrates as is often the case scholars speculate if he was a student of 0 furnace or some other philosophers but there is no direct evidence to support that Plato tells us a story that when Parmenides was old he visited Athens and had an encounter with Socrates we cannot be sure that this actually happened but it does seem to fit with the timeline he did not live in Athens however but in the city of Alea on the Italian peninsula but still within the greater Greek realm where he studied and then taught philosophy now I call Primanti's one of the four major pre-socratic philosophers along with dailies and pythagoras because his theories are among the most profound and impactful in Western philosophy and he also represents one of the two sides in what I have previously called the greatest debate of all time because if you remember the end of the video I did about Pythagoras I mentioned that there are now two distinct ways of doing philosophy one is a deductive reasoning where you engage in pure logic and the other one was an observation followed by inductive reasoning or trying to make sense of your observations and that philosophers can analyze both the nature of reality and the form of reality the Malaysians had so far mainly studied the nature of reality and they used observation followed by inductive reasoning to form theories while Pythagoras had tried to study the form of reality use mainly deductive reasoning or strict logic according to Parmenides both approaches were wrong he had to get back to studying the nature of reality and not its form but then he used a very strict logic and as he was doing that something started to bother him several things affect for example if there was indeed in RK whether its water or the Apeiron or air that would ultimately mean that there were little particles of RK right as in if you were to break it down to its smallest components you would get little bits of pure RK and an examinee said that you get different materials depending on how far apart these particles are the closer together those particles the harder the colder and the more rock-like the substance was and if it were further apart the hotter and more fire like it was but here is a question what is in between those particles if you say well there is something between them then that will mean that there is another substance a second RK but that was undercutting the whole idea that there was an arcade namely a one single substance and not two substances and if you said nothing then what was stopping those particles from sticking to each other incidentally this question would only be fully answered in a mathematical sense by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity just to give you an idea of how much of a headache this question gave philosophers and scientists for most of our history another question is one that came from Zeno furnace namely the difference between knowledge that is things you know absolutely sure and that cannot be questions and things that you may or may not be sure about but you only have believes or opinions about it how do you distinguish between those two how do you know for sure that one fact is something you know another fact is something you only believe and finally the no furnace also introduced a new opposite namely the opposite between being and not being but what was not being actually or what was nothing can you even really think about nothing okay let's take a few steps back let's imagine a single particle of RK surrounded by nothing now let's imagine it moving okay that looks like something but now let's really focus on the particle itself yes you see that but now a background is still moving so let's make it absolutely nothing a single particle surrounded by absolutely nothing moving around it doesn't look like anything to me exactly there is no reference no way to know if it is even moving so it might as well not move at all and as Parmenides were struggling with this question of particles and motion at nothingness he tried to formulate a way to deal with them and he wrote this down in a poem quite a long poem and thankfully much of it survived in it he begins by describing something like a journey to heaven where he is introduced to a goddess to us this sounds strange but it probably is just a stylistic figure and not an actual claim to divine revelation like Moses or Pythagoras the galliston explains to him that there are two ways of thinking thinking with rigid logic or having an opinion and then there are two things to think about thinking about what is and about what is not then he is told that you should only think with a rigid logic and only about what is he should not pay attention to all the different opinions of men nor should you think about what is not because it is literally unthinkable and this is what follows when you think logically about what is which is the second part of the poem whatever is is and what is must be what is cannot not exist and what is not cannot exist that you follow that whatever is is and whatever is necessarily exists and then the opposite whatever does not exist cannot exist and it is necessary that it doesn't exist as a philosopher Parmenides must think about what is not about what is not but only about what is what is cannot be destroyed nor can it comment to existence because if something comes into existence what are they come from and if it is destroyed where does it go nowhere this new particle of RK that just came into being it came into being from nothing truly nothing how can that generate something that is impossible therefore what is cannot move or grow or shrink and it cannot change all of these things are impossible if you really believe that the arcade is what the malicious thought it was this also makes it unthinkable to speak of time because the only way we even understand what time is has to do with how things move and change so whatever is has always been and will always be never changing never improving never deteriorating but always perfect and complete but what about everything that I see and that is moving what is that all of that is an illusion nothing you see or hear is really what is out there those are only opinions because everyone has different impressions experiences and observations none of it is truly real and the only reason you think that change is real and that one thing is different from another is because that is how you are trained to think but if we just open our eyes and think rationally we will see that only what is is and that what is not is not and cannot be thought of and then the third and final part of the poem looks as if it is providing a long and complex cosmology reading it carefully you will find that it is an interesting mixture on what some previous philosophers have proposed and some new ideas as well but it is introduced with a warning that this is merely a description of opinions of men this theoretical cosmology is not knowledge because they describe motion and change and thus cannot be one of the reasons he describes such an elaborate cosmology maybe to remind the reader of the fact that so far every philosopher had their own ideas beliefs and opinions about the cosmos and they all disagreed isn't the fact that they all disagreed proof enough that none of them really knew what the truth really was yeah that's like your opinion man so to summarize Parmenides is studying the nature of reality and he is using a rigid logic to drive his point home no speculations no mere opinions but only what can be known for sure counts this leads to the conclusion that whatever is truly is and what is not cannot exist and can be spoken about and cannot be thought what follows necessarily from this approach is that much of what we believe or assume about reality is not true change is not true motion is impossible variation cannot exist and time doesn't work this one extreme position in philosophy can be summed up in the famous phrase whatever is is for a next philosopher we will jump ahead in time and look at Parmenides his most famous student Zeno then we will come back to this time and see which philosopher is going to take Parmenides to task with an opposite an equally extreme position in the meantime you can subscribe for more and follow me on social media to see what else I'm working on [Music]

Channel: Solomon's Cave

Views: 15,780

Rating: 4.9276018 out of 5

Keywords: Parmenides, Philosophy, Greek, Elea, Being, Ancient Greek Philosophy

Id: GBZLHhqNOY8

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018