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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
A MURDER MYSTERY
Parmenides' influence on Plato is both obvious and acknowledged. Parmenides claimed that there is no such thing as what is not, so all there is is one, single, uniform and self-identical entity, unchanging and imperishable, eternal and complete:
Only one story of a way remains yet, that it is; on that way there are very many signs, that being ungenerated and imperishable it is, whole, single-natured and immovable and complete: it never was nor will be, since it is now all together one and continuous.
(DK 28B8.1–6)Proper reasoning and accurate speech should be directed at this entity alone; belief, which tries to talk about plurality, is fraught with contradiction and (so) unreason:
It is the same thing to think and the thought that it is. For you will not find thinking without what is, in which it is expressed. For nothing is nor will be other than what is, since Fate has bound it to be whole and immobile. In respect of this everything is named which men have posited, convinced it is true, becoming and perishing, being and not-being, and change of place and alteration of bright colour.
(DK 28B8.34–41)Plato's own account of the nature of forms (single-natured, eternal, unchanging) appears deeply indebted to Parmenides' account of the One, even if Plato allows the plural world of sensation to be quite satisfactorily real, and even if his forms are themselves plural. Plato's own account of reason, moreover, has an Eleatic origin; both Parmenides and Plato suppose that reason can deliver its conclusions without the benefit of sense-perception.
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