Eleatic School
The Eleatic
School is an early Pre-Socratic school of philosophy founded by Parmenides
in the 5th Century B.C. at Elea, a Greek colony in southern
Italy. Other important members of the school include Zeno of Elea, Melissus
of Samos (born c. 470 B.C.) and (arguably) the earlier Xenophanes of
Colophon (570 – 480 B.C.)
Xenophanes
in particular criticized the belief in a pantheon of anthropomorphic
gods which was then current, and Parmenides developed his ideas further,
concluding that the reality of the world is "One Being", an unchanging,
timeless, indestructible whole, in opposition to the theories of
the early physicalist philosophers. Later, he became an early exponent of the duality
of appearance and reality, and his work was highly influential
on later Platonic metaphysics.
Zeno of
Elea is best known for his paradoxes (see the Paradoxes section of the
page on Logic). But Aristotle has also called him the inventor of the dialectic
(the exchange of propositions and counter-propositions to arrive at a
conclusion), and Bertrand Russell credited him with having laid the foundations
of modern Logic.
The
Eleatics rejected the epistemological validity of sense experience,
preferring reason and logical standards of clarity and necessity
to be the criteria of truth. Parmenides and Melissus generally built
their arguments up from indubitably sound premises, while Zeno primarily
attempted to destroy the arguments of others by showing their premises led to contradictions
("reductio ad absurdum").
Although
the conclusions of the Eleatics were largely rejected by the later Pre-Socratic
and Socratic philosophers, their arguments were taken seriously, and
they are generally credited with improving the standards of discourse
and argument in their time.
No comments:
Post a Comment