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A Note on Parmenides' Denial of Past and Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Mohan Matthen
Mohan Matthen
Affiliation:
The University of Alberta
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Extract

In à recent issue of Dialogue, Leo Groarke attempts to defend the claim that Parmenides was committed to an atemporal reality.

He argues like this:

(1) In the Parmenidean dictum “[It] is and cannot not be” (B2.4), “is” means “exists”, and is in the present tense (536).

(2) (According to Parmenides) there is nothing that fails to exist (536).

(3) It follows from (1) and (2) that “the past is not” and “the future is not” (537).

(4) If the past and future are not, then the present is not. “All three tenses go down the drain together” (538), and so reality is atem-poral.

Type
Interventions
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1986 , pp. 553 - 557
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1986

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References

1 Groarke, Leo, “Parmenides' Timeless Universe”, Dialogue 24/3 (Autumn 1985), 535–541Google Scholar.

2 Owen, G. E. L., “Plato and Parmenides on the Timeless Present”, Monist 50 (1966), 317–340CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 It was, ofcourse, Plato who first showed that when we define truth and falsity in terms of existence and non-existence, the Parmenidean dictum leads to the absurd conclusion that false statements cannot be said or thought. See Sophist, 237–242.

4 Matthen, Mohan, “Greek Ontology and the ‘Is’ of Truth”, Phronesis 28/2 (1983), 113–135. Martin Tweedale has found the same phenomenon in Alexander of Aphrodisias: see his “Alexander of Aphrodisias' Views on Universals”, Phronesis 29/3 (1984), 279–303. I think that it can also be found in medieval authors, for instance, in Anselm's De GrammaticosGoogle Scholar.

5 De Generatione et Comiptione 319b25–31; Physica 190a10–12.

6 For example, Furth, Montgomery, “Elements of Eleatic Ontology”, in Mourelatos, Alexander P. D., éd., The Pre-Socratks (New: Anchor Press, 1974), 260Google Scholar.

7 Thanks are due to David Gallop, who was this journal's anonymous referee.