Customer Reviews

By Being, It Is: The Thesis of Parmenides

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The value of working with the fragments of Parmenides, as Cordero does with skill and thoroughness, is the purity of the material. Here, after all, are pieces of one of the earliest and most important presocratic documents from the Axial Age, when the great teachers of philospohy and religion were all alive. As someone who has also worked with these fragments for some time, I found Cordero's interpretation of the Greek and his conclusions about form and meaning highly informative. This is a masterful piece of work. My only reservation has to do with his fairly traditional interpretation of the important issue of truth vs opinion. This, of course, is the crux of the poem and we wll wish we had more of it to study.

I first read, some years ago, Heidegger's "Parmenides". Then I purchased Cordero's book (in Spanish; the author's name means "lamb") quite a while ago, but I waited to review it until I had read Curd's version (The Legacy of Parmenides), and could compare the three. In my opinion, this is the best, although more restricted than Curd's, which, as the title implies, also includes her views on Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the atomists, etc.
The leitmotiv (and title) is more forceful and meaningful in Spanish ("Siendo, se es" instead of the English "By being, it is"), but I trust not much will have been lost in translation.
The good point of this book is that it is authoritative. Cordero has spent most of his life studying the ancient texts, including the first printed (Venetian) edition, in 1526 if I remember rightly, and thus doesn't have to rely on third parties' interpretations, but can form his own opinion first hand. He is quite sure of what he's saying, and, while that's not a guarantee of being right, it imparts to his writing a charm that Curd's, to my taste, lacks.
As to who's "right", that's to my mind a secondary question, the more so as P. himself might have been totally "wrong". There are as many interpretations as there are readers (or at least writers: Mourelatos, Vlastos, Guthrie, Cornford, etc., etc., etc.), and nobody can demonstrate irrefutably that the particular case he's advocating is decisively better that the others, the more so as most of the second part of P.'s poem [the Doxa: something like "Opinion" in archaic Greek; the first part, on which we have much more data, is called the "Aletheia": something like "Truth" in archaic Greek)] is missing and its content, aside from a few fragments, is conjectural. So, much of the "fun" of reading this type of book (which is heavily philological: for example Cordero devotes about a page, and a long footnote, to defend a correction he makes to the original text of the Diels edition, namely to substitute Diel's "eirge noema" by "arkhei" -"arkhestai" in middle voice second person of the aorist-, against a further modification introduced by Nehamas two years later, who, inspired by Cordero, nonetheless believes that the right word is "arkho" -same verb but active voice first person future-) resides in following the writer's arguments and comparing them to others'. It's rather like a VERY arcane Ellery Queen mystery, with multiple endings, of which you can choose the one you think best suited to the facts as presented or presumed.
So yes, definitely buy this book, but beware!, it's not for everybody. I would say its level of difficulty is a little higher than Curd's, and comparable for example to Detienne's "The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece", if that's the correct title in English.