The
Eleatics were a school of
pre-SocraticThe pre-Socratic Greek philosophers were active before Socrates or contemporaneously, but expounding knowledge developed earlier. The popularity of the term originates with Hermann Diels' work Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker...
philosophersPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
at
EleaVelia is the Italian name of the ancient town of Elea located on the territory of the comune of Ascea, Salerno, Campania, Italy in a geographical sub-area named Cilento...
(now Velia), a Greek colony in
CampaniaCampania is a region of southern Italy in Europe. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,595 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...
,
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
. The group was founded in the early fifth century BCE by
ParmenidesParmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. Parmenides was also a priest of Apollo and iatromantis. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem which has survived only in...
. Other members of the school included
Zeno of EleaZeno of Elea was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic...
and
Melissus of SamosMelissus of Samos is the third and last member of the ancient school of Eleatic philosophy, whose other members include Zeno and Parmenides, the most important of the Presocratics. Unlike his predecessor Zeno, Melissus’ contribution is a treatise of systematic philosophical arguments supporting...
.
Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, poet, and social and religious critic. Our knowledge of his views comes from fragments of his poetry, surviving as quotations by later Greek writers...
is sometimes included in the list, though there is some dispute over this.
The school took its name from Elea, a Greek city of lower Italy, the home of its chief exponents, Parmenides and Zeno.
The
Eleatics were a school of
pre-SocraticThe pre-Socratic Greek philosophers were active before Socrates or contemporaneously, but expounding knowledge developed earlier. The popularity of the term originates with Hermann Diels' work Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker...
philosophersPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
at
EleaVelia is the Italian name of the ancient town of Elea located on the territory of the comune of Ascea, Salerno, Campania, Italy in a geographical sub-area named Cilento...
(now Velia), a Greek colony in
CampaniaCampania is a region of southern Italy in Europe. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,595 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...
,
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
. The group was founded in the early fifth century BCE by
ParmenidesParmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. Parmenides was also a priest of Apollo and iatromantis. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem which has survived only in...
. Other members of the school included
Zeno of EleaZeno of Elea was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic...
and
Melissus of SamosMelissus of Samos is the third and last member of the ancient school of Eleatic philosophy, whose other members include Zeno and Parmenides, the most important of the Presocratics. Unlike his predecessor Zeno, Melissus’ contribution is a treatise of systematic philosophical arguments supporting...
.
Xenophanes of Colophon was a Greek philosopher, poet, and social and religious critic. Our knowledge of his views comes from fragments of his poetry, surviving as quotations by later Greek writers...
is sometimes included in the list, though there is some dispute over this.
History
The school took its name from Elea, a Greek city of lower Italy, the home of its chief exponents, Parmenides and Zeno. Its foundation is often attributed to Xenophanes of Colophon, but, although there is much in his speculations which formed part of the later Eleatic doctrine, it is probably more correct to regard Parmenides as the founder of the school.
Xenophanes espoused a belief that "God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or in mind." [Zeller, Vorsokrastische Philosophie, p. 530, n. 3.] Parmenides developed some of Xenophanes's
metaphysicalMetaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world...
ideas. Subsequently, the school debated the possibility of
motionIn physics, motion means a change in the location of a body. Change in motion is the result of applied force. Motion is typically described in terms of velocity, acceleration, displacement, and time. An object's velocity cannot change unless it is acted upon by a force, as described by Newton's...
and other such fundamental questions. The work of the school was influential upon
PlatonicPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world...
metaphysics.
Philosophy
The Eleatics rejected the
epistemologicalEpistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge...
validity of sense experience, and instead took logical standards of clarity and necessity to be the criteria of
truthTruth can have a variety of meanings, from the state of being the case, being in accord with a particular fact or reality, being in accord with the body of real things, events, actuality, or fidelity to an original or to a standard. In archaic usage it could be fidelity, constancy or sincerity in...
. Of the members, Parmenides and Melissus built arguments starting from indubitably sound premises. Zeno, on the other hand, primarily employed the
reductio ad absurdumIn logic, proof by contradiction is a form of proof that establishes the truth or validity of a proposition by showing that the premise that the proposition is false implies a contradiction...
, attempting to destroy the arguments of others by showing their premises led to contradictions (
Zeno's paradoxesZeno's paradoxes are a set of problems generally thought to have been devised by Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides's doctrine that "all is one" and that, contrary to the evidence of our senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion...
).
The main doctrines of the Eleatics were evolved in opposition to the theories of the early
physicalistPhysicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things...
philosophers, who explained all existence in terms of primary
matterThe term matter traditionally refers to the substance that all objects are made of. One common way to identify this "substance" is through its physical properties; a common definition of matter is anything that has mass and occupies a volume...
, and to the theory of
HeraclitusHeraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
, which declared that all existence may be summed up as perpetual change. The Eleatics maintained that the true explanation of things lies in the conception of a universal
unityThe goal of Henosis is union with the hen, the one, source or Monad. This concept is prominent in the realm of Neoplatonic philosophy, within the mystery religions, and in the writings of the Corpus Hermeticum.-Divine Work:...
of being. According to their doctrine, the senses cannot cognize this unity, because their reports are inconsistent; it is by thought alone that we can pass beyond the false appearances of sense and arrive at the
knowledgeKnowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or awareness or familiarity gained...
of being, at the fundamental truth that the All is One. Furthermore, there can be no creation, for being cannot come from non-being, because a thing cannot arise from that which is different from it. They argued that errors on this point commonly arise from the ambiguous use of the verb to be, which may imply existence or be merely the
copulaIn linguistics, a copula , also called a "passive verb" or "linking verb", is a word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate . The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a link or tie that connects two different things.A copula is sometimes a verb or a verb-like part of speech...
which connects
subjectThe subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle. The other constituent is the predicate...
and
predicateIn traditional grammar, a predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence . For the simple sentence "John [is yellow]," John acts as the subject, and is yellow acts as the predicate, a subsequent description of the subject headed with a verb.In current linguistic semantics, a predicate is an...
.
Though the conclusions of the Eleatics were rejected by the later Presocratics and
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
, their arguments were taken seriously, and they are generally credited with improving the standards of discourse and argument in their time. Their influence was likewise longlasting --
GorgiasGorgias "the Nihilist", Greek sophist, pre-socratic philosopher and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger...
, a Sophist, argued in the style of the Eleatics in his work "On Nature or What Is Not," and
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world...
acknowledged them in the
Parmenides, the
Sophist and the
Politicus. Furthermore, much of the later philosophy of the ancient period borrowed from the methods and principles of the Eleatics.