Michael V. Wedin presents a new interpretation of Parmenides' Way of Truth: the most important philosophical treatise before the work of Plato and Aristotle. The Way of Truth contains the first extended philosophical argument in the western tradition - an argument which decrees that there can be no motion, change, growth, coming to be, or destruction; and indeed that there can be only one thing. These severe metaphysical theses are established by a series of deductions and these deductions in turn rest on an even more fundamental claim, namely, the claim that it is impossible that there be something that is not. This claim is itself established by a deduction that Wedin calls the Governing Deduction. Wedin offers a rigorous reconstruction of the Governing Deduction and shows how it is used in the arguments that establish Parmenides' severe metaphysical theses (what Wedin calls the Corollaries of the Governing Deduction). He also provides successful answers to most commentators who find Parmenides' arguments to be shot through with logical fallacies. Finally, Wedin turns to what is currently the fashionable reading of Parmenides, according to which he falls squarely in the tradition of the Ionian natural philosophers. He argues that the arguments for the Ionian Interpretation fail badly. Thus, we must simply determine where Parmenides' argument runs, and here there is no substitute for rigorous logical reconstruction. On this count, as our reconstructions make clear, the argument of the Way of Truth leads to a Parmenides who is indeed a severe arbiter of philosophical discourse and who brings to a precipitous halt the entire enterprise of natural explanation in the Ionian tradition.

Michael V. Wedin presents a new interpretation of Parmenides' Way of Truth: the most important philosophical treatise before the work of Plato and Aristotle. The Way of Truth contains the first extended philosophical argument in the western tradition—an argument which decrees that there can be no motion, change, growth, coming to be, or destruction; and indeed that there can be only one thing. These severe metaphysical theses are established by a series of deductions and these deductions in turn rest on an even more fundamental claim, namely, the claim that it is impossible that there be something that is not. This claim is itself established by a deduction that Wedin calls the Governing Deduction. Wedin offers a rigorous reconstruction of the Governing Deduction and shows how it is used in the arguments that establish Parmenides' severe metaphysical theses (what Wedin calls the Corollaries of the Governing Deduction). He also provides successful answers to most commentators who find Parmenides' arguments to be shot through with logical fallacies. Finally, Wedin turns to what is currently the fashionable reading of Parmenides, according to which he falls squarely in the tradition of the Ionian natural philosophers. He argues that the arguments for the Ionian Interpretation fail badly. Thus, we must simply determine where Parmenides' argument runs, and here there is no substitute for rigorous logical reconstruction. On this count, as our reconstructions make clear, the argument of the Way of Truth leads to a Parmenides who is indeed a severe arbiter of philosophical discourse and who brings to a precipitous halt the entire enterprise of natural explanation in the Ionian tradition.

Two streams run through the Western philosophical stream: one characterized by Being, beings, the unchanging, the static, and the unitary; and the other by Action, actions, the changing, the dynamic, and the diverse. The former might be represented by Parmenides, Plato, and much of what followed; the latter by Heraclitus, and by rather less of what followed. The book explores the "Action" stream as it wound its way through history, through Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Maurice Blondel, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, process philosophy and theology, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Boys Smith. The journey enables us to create the beginnings of an "actology": a way of seeing ourselves, the universe, and God in terms of actions in patterns rather than as beings that change. Such an actology offers a complete alternative narrative far more in tune with the diverse and rapidly changing world in which we live than the ontology that has shaped philosophy, theology, and much else for the past two thousand years.

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is a volume of original articles on all aspects of ancient philosophy. The articles may be of substantial length, and include critical notices of major books. OSAP is now published twice yearly, in both hardback and paperback.

Demonstrates how the invention of extended deductive argumentation by Parmenides depended on his use of poetic road imagery.

"The central aim of The Parmenidean Ascent is to reveal the power of an extreme monism of a Parmenidean variety in a more uncompromising manner than has been attempted for many a year. For the Parmenidean monist, there are no distinctions whatsoever, and indeed distinctions are unintelligible. The book not only defends-against the tide of much recent scholarship-the attribution of such a sweeping monism to Parmenides, it also embraces this monism in its own right and expands these monistic results to many of the most crucial areas of philosophy. The topics that come in for this rationalistic, monistic, treatment include being, action, knowledge, meaning, truth, and metaphysical explanation. There is thus no differentiated being, no differentiated action, knowledge, etc. Rather all is being, just as all is action, knowledge, etc. The motive force behind this argument is a combination of a detailed survey of the failures of leading positions (both historical and contemporary) to meet a demand for the explanation of a given phenomenon, and a powerful rationalist, Bradleyan argument against the reality of relations. The result is a rationalist rejection of all distinctions and a skeptical denial of the intelligibility of ordinary, relational notions of being, action, knowledge, etc. A further significant upshot is the rejection of any distinction between philosophy itself and the study of its history. Throughout the book, attention is paid to philosophical methods systems, including especially the method, so popular today, of relying on intuitions and common sense. The historically-minded and rationalist approach throughout this book goes a long way toward demonstrating the ultimate bankruptcy of this prevalent methodology"--

This book provides a collection of essays representing the state of the art in the research into argumentation in classical antiquity. It contains essays from leading and up and coming scholars on figures as diverse as Parmenides, Gorgias, Seneca, and Classical Chinese "wandering persuaders." The book includes contributions from specialists in the history of philosophy as well as specialists in contemporary argumentation theory, and stimulates the dialogue between scholars studying issues relating to argumentation theory in ancient philosophy and contemporary argumentation theorists. Furthermore, the book sets the direction for research into argumentation in antiquity by encouraging an engagement with a broader range of historical figures, and closer collaboration between contemporary concerns and the history of philosophy.

This seventh edition of Philosophic Classics, Volume I: Ancient Philosophy includes essential writings of the most important Greek philosophers, along with selections from some of their Roman followers. In updating this edition, editor Forrest E. Baird has continued to follow the same criteria established by the late Walter Kaufmann when the Philosophic Classics series was first established: (1) to use complete works or, where more appropriate, complete sections of works (2) in clear translations (3) of texts central to the thinker’s philosophy or widely accepted as part of the "canon." To make the works more accessible to students, most footnotes treating textual matters (variant readings, etc.) have been omitted and important Greek words have been transliterated and put in angle brackets. In addition, each thinker is introduced by a brief essay composed of three sections: (1) biographical (a glimpse of the life), (2) philosophical (a résumé of the philosopher’s thought), and (3) bibliographical (suggestions for further reading). New to this seventh edition: Changes in translations: New translations of Plato’s Apology and Phaedo and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Politics from the acclaimed Focus Philosophical Library Series. New translations of Plato’s Euthyphro and Crito. New translations of Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus, Letter to Menoeceus, and Principal Doctrines. New translation of the Parmenides fragments. Additional material: Gorgias’s model oration, Encomium on Helen, which gives a defense of Helen of Troy. A selection from Plato’s Gorgias on nature versus convention or law . Additional material from the opening of Plato’s Symposium to contextualize the dialogue. Additional material from Plato’s Republic (Book IX) on the tri-partite soul. Additional material from Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Book IV, 1-4, 7) on the nature of being and the so-called "three rules of thought." A brief selection from Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, giving a sense of the person. Updated and reorganized bibliographies. To allow for all these changes, a section of Book V from Plato’s Republic has been dropped. Those who use this first volume in a one-term course in ancient philosophy will find more material here than can easily fit a normal semester. But this embarrassment of riches gives teachers some choice and, for those who offer the same course year after year, an opportunity to change the menu.

A. A. Long presents fourteen essays on the themes of selfhood and rationality in ancient Greek philosophy. The discussion ranges over seven centuries of innovative thought, starting with Heraclitus' injunction to listen to the cosmic logos, and concluding with Plotinus' criticism of those who make embodiment essential to human identity. For the Greek philosophers the notion of a rational self was bound up with questions about divinity and happiness called eudaimonia, meaning a god-favoured life or a life of likeness to the divine. While these questions are remote from current thought, Long also situates the book's themes in modern discussions of the self and the self's normative relation to other people and the world at large. Ideas and behaviour attributed to Socrates and developed by Plato are at the book's centre. They are preceded by essays that explore general facets of the soul's rationality. Later chapters bring in salient contributions made by Aristotle and Stoic philosophers. All but one of these pieces has been previously published in periodicals or conference volumes, but the author has revised and updated everything. The book is written in a style that makes it accessible to many kinds of reader, not only professors and graduate students but also anyone interested in the history of our identity as rational animals.

In this study of the fragments of Parmenides' hexameter poem, "On Nature", Alexander P.D. Mourelatos combines traditional philological reconstruction with the approaches of literary criticism and philosophical analysis to reveal the thought structure and expressive unity of the best preserved, most important and coherent text of Greek philosophy before Plato. The author shows how Parmenides' deduction of the signposts and bounds of what-is critically defines the concept of reality implicit in Greek-cognitive vocabulary and in early speculative cosmologies. He interprets the second part of the poem, the Doxa, as a cosmology designed to bring out both similarities and contrasts with Parmenides' own doctrine of what-is. The Doxa thus serves as a semantic commentary on the first part, the Truth. Mourelatos' discussions of the concepts of persuasion, fidelity, opinion, belief, and appearance elucidate terms strategically important for interpreting Parmenides and contribute in the history of Greek philosophical vocabulary.