From the Beginning to Plato

152 PYTHAGOREANS AND ELEATICS
thought. Of these passages, though, (b) and (c) are rhetorical flourishes, in no way
essential to the argument; while (a), which occurs before principle (7) has been
introduced, need only mean that at most those two ways can be thought.
14 Xenophanes, for instance, would have questioned the ambition of establishing the
truth, rather than mapping out by enquiry coherent possibilities for well-based
opinion.
15 Whether this reality is objective or not, is not here at issue. On this question, see
‘Conclusion; the Trouble with Thinking’.
16 Though verbal echoes suggest that Parmenides (not surprisingly) had Heraclitus,
with his aggressive use of (?apparent) contradictions, particularly in mind.
17 Some have taken the spatial and temporal ways of speaking literally. Literal
sphericity and centre: e.g. Cornford [4.19], Barnes [2.8]; against this, e.g. Owen [4.
46], 61–8. Persistence through time: e.g. Fränkel [4.20], sect 6; Schofield [4.48];
against this, Owen [4.47] The tense-logical principle ascribed to Parmenides at p.
140 above would not commit him to the reality of time in any sense.
18 For example, Plato Sophist 242d4–6; Parmenides 12834–433; Aristotle
Metaphysics 1.5, 986b10–19. Recent views on just what the monism amounts to,
and of the reliability of Plato’s testimony, have differed widely; Barnes [4.39]
maintains that Parmenides is not a monist at all.
19 The contemptuous term ‘mortals’ may itself hint at their double mistake, by itself
presupposing that mistake: it is plural, and it implies the reality of death. By their
very error, they condemn themselves to appear to themselves as plural and
ephemeral. Interesting parallels for this in early Brahmanical monism, e.g. in the
Katha Upanishad:
…Herein there’s no diversity at all.
Death beyond death is all the lot
Of him who sees in this what seems to be diverse.
(R.C.Zaehner, Hindu Scriptures (Everyman’s Library: London and New York,
Dent/Dutton, 1966); 178)
20 That the bare possibility of deception suffices to destroy a claim to knowledge had
been pointed out by Xenophanes (DK 21 B 34).
21 On Xenophanes see the section ‘The Promise of the Goddess’.
22 But what it is (if anything), in the nature of reality, that underwrites this practical
usefulness, is not clear. There is a hint (‘it had to be that opinions should reputably
be’, B1.32) that Parmenides did envisage such a guarantee; and see below on the
cosmology as formally parallel to the section dealing with alētheiē.
Scholarly opinion has been much divided on the status and purpose of the section
concerned with the ‘opinions of mortals’. They have been taken, for example, as a
‘dialectical’ refutation by analysis of the presuppositions of ordinary mortals
(Owen [4.46]), a ‘history of the genesis of illusion’ (Hölscher [4.22]), a ‘case-study
in self-deception’ (Mourelatos [4.24]); or as reportage of the latest (Pythagorean)
fashion in cosmology (Cornford [4.19]). Or, as here, they have been taken to be
meant seriously as empirical science (and philosophy of science); so e.g. Calogero
[4.18], Verdenius [4.27], Fränkel [4.20].