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13998039 No.13998039 [Reply] [Original]

Is reading and actually understanding Parmenides supposed to be difficult or am I just a brainlet?
Based on his verses, the gist I am getting is this:
If you can think of something, it is (is basically means it exists), therefore there is no such thing as nothing, since the very fact that you can think of “nothing” means that that “nothing” is actually something.
How close or far away am I from understanding the text?

>> No.13998062

You can't think of nothing. Eternalism. Monism.

I prefer Heraclitus and Empedocles.

>> No.13998075

>>13998062
I found their ideas to be much easier to digest. But that might be because they only exist in much smaller fragments

>> No.13998111

>>13998039
>Is reading and actually understanding Parmenides supposed to be difficult or am I just a brainlet?
Don't worry, even Whitehead didn't get it

>> No.13998124

>>13998039
You can’t really think of nothing though. Something exists, while non-existence non-exists, as it should be. “What is, is; what is not, is not.” For nothingness to exist would be a contradiction.

>> No.13998136

>>13998124
To clarify When I say nothing I mean the concept of nothingness, not actually the absence of thought

>> No.13998233

>>13998039
See, I thought it was more complicated.
>If you can think of something, it exists
>I can think of things as they were in the past
>So they still exist
>But if things as they were in the past still exist, things never change
>So things never change
>If things never change, change is impossible
>So...

>> No.13998253

>>13998233
I think this is where he further expands on the idea in the original post. Everything that happens is and everything that doesn’t happen is not, and since only what is is, what is not is not, so change isn’t real since change would require something that is to become something that is not or vice verse

>> No.13998264

Reality by Peter Kingsley claims Parmenides was a shaman and his poetry was esoteric and initiatic.

>> No.13998309

This is Parmenides argument against change: Suppose that Socrates changes from not being musical one day to being musical the next. We can comment on this as being a case of the musical Socrates' coming into being. But then we have to defend the conceptual coherence of saying that something has come into being. But there seem to be only two ways in which something could come into being, either, that is, from something that already exists or from nothing at all. But if the coming into being was from something that already exists or from nothing at all. But if the coming into being was from something that already exists, then it would have to be from the very same thing previously existing as has supposedly come into being (on pain of the same objection arising in a different form), and in that case there would simply not be a case of something coming into being at all. On the other hand, it is self-evidently absurd to suggest that anything could come into being from absolutely nothing at all. Thus the notion of coming into being, and with it of all change, is fundamentally incoherent.

I think the problem is solved by instead looking at change in terms of there being something that persists though the change and acquires some feature that it did not have before. Socrates coming into existence is a case of something composite being rearranged. There is something that persists and something that is added (or taken away). Thus musical Socrates did not exist previously and in a way it did. Socrates existed and then became musical.

>> No.13998337

That concept is called intentional reality. Descartes explains it, which is why it’s a good idea to begin philosophy with meditations.

>> No.13998356

>>13998309
>Thus musical Socrates did not exist previously and in a way it did.
This is essentially the act/potency distinction which Aristotle introduces to solve so many of the problems of previous philosophers. It's a shame modern philosophers are so bent on reintroducing those problems by denying Aristotelianism.

>> No.13998487

>>13998111
trips of truth

>> No.13998491

>>13998264
I am inclined to agree myself, thanks for the rec I'll be checkung it out

>> No.13998957

bump

>> No.13998997

Just read it faggot. I recommend Stanley Lombardo's translation