The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought [Kindle Edition]

Patricia Curd (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This ground-breaking book offers an unorthodox reading of Parmenides' philosophy . . . Curd is a close, careful reader of the Parmenidean text. Her translations are both highly accurate and readable. . . . This excellent book . . . places Parmenides in the context of his historical predecessors and delineates his influence on the subsequent history of philosophy as well.
(Religious Studies Review )

The Legacy of Parmenides represents a milestone along the way of Parmenides' interpretation. . . . It will prove indispensable.
(Alexaner Nehamas International Studies in Philosophy )

Product Description

Parmenides of Elea was the most important and influential philosopher before Plato. Patricia Curd here reinterprets Parmenides' views and offers a new account of his relation to his predecessors and successors.

In the traditional interpretation, Parmenides argues that generation, destruction, and change are unreal and that only one thing exists. He therefore rejected as impossible the scientific inquiry practiced by the earlier Presocratic philosophers. But the philosophers who came after Parmenides attempted to explain natural change and they assumed the reality of a plurality of basic entities. Thus, on the traditional interpretation, the later Presocratics either ignored or contradicted his arguments. In this book, Patricia Curd argues that Parmenides sought to reform rather than to reject scientific inquiry and offers a more coherent account of his influence on the philosophers who cameafter him.

The Legacy of Parmenides provides a detailed examination of Parmenides' arguments, considering his connection to earlier Greek thought and how his account of "what-is" could serve as model for later philosophers. It then considers the theories of those who came after him, including the Pluralists (Anaxagoras and Empedocles), the Atomists (Leucippus and Democritus), the later Eleatics (Zeno and Melissus), and the later Presocratics (Philolaus of Croton and Diogenes of Apollonia). The book closes with a discussion of the importance of Parmenides' views for the development of Plato's Theory of Forms.

This first-time in paperback edition includes a new Introduction by the author in which she clarifies her position on the following points: Monism, Internal and External Negations, Locomotion and the Specification of How What-is Is, and Doxa. Also added is a Supplementary Bibliography. (The Legacy of Parmenides was first published in hardcover in 1997 by Princeton University Press).

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 3163 KB
• Print Length: 309 pages
• Publisher: Parmenides Publishing; 2 edition (November 20, 2004)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0029F2HIW
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #317,991 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book - does not rate a one review, January 1, 2006

By 

a reader in Europe - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought (Paperback)

This book doesn't rate a one. For contrast, do check out the highly positive review on Bryn Mawr's site

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2005/2005-06-05.html

I can't really add anything better to their review, but I'll identify a few points that grabbed my attention. Of especial interest is Chapter five dealing with Leucippus and Democritus - the framework of atomism as a response to, yet working within the Eleatic tradition. Books covering Democritean atomism are thin on the ground and this chapter is a welcome treat.

There is also a good deal of discussion of Eleatic influence on Plato, the author going so far as to identify him as the last of the Presocratics. This is a very well researched book, covering a broad sweep of study in a remarkably thorough and systematic way. Highly recommended reading.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars About average?, December 7, 2008

By 

WB, Zeno - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought (Paperback)

(I mean, among those that write seriously on Parmenides).

To be honest, I'm not sure. So:

STRONG POINTS: (1) The coverage of the book is extensive; it includes not only Parmenides but Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the Atomists (Leucippus and Democritus), Zeno, Melissus and some Plato. (2) Curd is modest and forthright: when she's not sure about some interpretation (even her own) she states the fact clearly. (3) She is thorough: the book is one of the most (or THE most) extensively footnoted I have ever read, and the notes are mostly not mere citations, but interesting in their own right.

WEAK POINTS: there's really only one, and it's that, for my taste, Curd's style is almost schoolgirlish, her impressive credentials notwithstanding. One would say she's writing her Ph. D. thesis. Also, and that's the other side of her thoroughness, she tends to be too interested (in fact as far as possible) in the literal side of things: what X really said. But that's the least interesting part of philosophy -or of literature for that matter-: it's a well-known fact that readers put much, much more into any text than what the author originally did/meant (assuming THAT was clear to him to start with). Thus, if Zeno's Stadium argument is based on the fact that he didn't understand relative motion, as Aristotle supposed, well, that's it; no need to read or cite Zeno today. But if instead Zeno wanted to show that the hypothesis of time being discrete leads to a logical contradiction, and that this, coupled with his arrow paradox, shows to him that a rational explanation of motion is impossible [a thing by the way Curd does't understand when she says (in Note 118 to page 172) that "The obvious possibility of motion (as reported by the senses) provides evidence that Zeno's arguments are unsound"], then THIS possibility is of the outmost interest (at least to me), and is the reason of the continuing interest in Zeno as a symbol, whether he meant it exactly or not. Likewise for what Parmenides might have meant by his apparent monism (as Curd carefully explores), and so on.

My doxa? If you're interested, but not terribly, in the Presocratics, buy this book. It's not overly difficult even for a layman (the Greek is invariably rendered into English, and I would qualify it as almost didactic), and it's thorough. If you want to dig, then supplement it with other, deeper scholars (Mourelatos, Vlastos, Cordero, Guthrie if you want a more philosophical and less philological approach, etc.). In any case it's not a bad addition to your shelves. Be aware, however, that the footnote density is such that you'll have to read it twice: once straight through, taking in only the text; a second time, once you have grasped what Curd has to say, again, but reading also the notes, which it would be a pity to miss, but which break the argument too much in a first perusal.

18 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars One step forward, two steps back, May 21, 2001

By 

John F. Pepple (Mount Vernon, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Legacy of Parmenides (Hardcover)

The biggest virtue of this book is that the author sees a major problem with the standard interpretation of Parmenides and his influence. Its biggest defect is that she ignores all the OTHER major problems with that interpretation.

The standard interpretation says that Parmenides was brilliant, he believed that only one thing existed, he had an enormous influence on his successors, and his philosophy received its first genuine refutation in Plato's Sophist. The problem that Professor Curd finds is that none of his successors ever produced any arguments against the second claim. They simply assumed that there was more than one thing, even though they seemed to accept other things that Parmenides had argued for. She then concludes that Parmenides did NOT believe that only one thing existed; instead, he believed that whatever exists can have only one nature. Yet, is it really likely that this is all that Parmenides believed? The author mentions the passage at Parmenides 128c-d where Zeno talked about how Parmenides had been ridiculed by others, but seems unconcerned by it, yet is it really likely that believing that everything has one nature would have elicited ridicule? Moreover, she seems unaware of the Commentary by Proclus, where he tells what these people said: "if being is one, then Parmenides and Zeno do not both exist at the same time" (619). Naturally, we don't know if Proclus was right about this, but Prof. Curd seems totally unaware of it. The reasonable conclusion is that Parmenides believed that only one thing existed. By going against this, Prof. Curd has taken us two steps backwards, even though she has taken us a step forward by pointing out a major flaw in the standard interpretation.

The big question for those who accept either the standard interpretation or Prof. Curd's revision of it is: Did Parmenides have an enormous influence on his successors? To see that he did not, it is sufficient to mention just a single name: Cratylus. Cratylus was a Heraclitean and paid no attention whatsoever to the strictures developed by Parmenides. People who accept the standard interpretation almost never say anything about Cratylus, for obvious reasons. Prof. Curd herself mentions him just once, in a footnote. But not talking about Cratylus will hardly make him go away.

In addition, here are just a few of the facts about the standard interpretation that I find troubling: Protagoras is said to have written a book refuting Parmenides, Plato hardly mentioned Parmenides in his early and middle periods, Aristotle did not record that Plato was influenced by Parmenides, Plato seems to have a refutation of Parmenides at Euthydemus 286a-d (which is long before the refutation in the Sophist), and finally, the movement begun by Parmenides DIED with Melissus. Why? Why would a viable and powerful philosophical movement just die?

I invite Prof. Curd or anyone else to give a convincing explanation of these points.