Parmenides, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
What I denied in B8 is that what genuinely is — what meets the semata, what is necessarily — can come to be, perish, change place, or alter. That is what is ruled out: motion in necessary being. I did not write a sentence that denies the phenomenal world of becoming and motion. B8.38-41 reports that mortals have named coming-to-be, perishing, change of place, and alteration of color — and the naming is the move mortal cognition makes once it has accepted the founding error of treating not-being as if it were something.
The mortal world of change is not strictly negated by the deduction; it is shown not to satisfy the semata, and therefore not to be the object of genuine knowledge. There is a difference between not knowing what is contingent in the strict sense and denying that anything contingent occurs. The Doxa, mine in the sense already explained, is the cosmology of what contingently happens. The route of is is the deductive treatment of what cannot, by its nature, be otherwise.12
Furthermore, it is inconceivable that something should be generated alongside it from Not-being. Being therefore could be moved neither to come into being nor to perish, but the issue is between the two ways is not, which has already been decided in favour of is. Now since the subject of becoming, whether past, present or future, is not, it can neither be nor become what is, sc. Being.The Fragments of Parmenides, [197]–[198]
After the rejection of one of these (οὐκ ἔστιν ['a thing is not']) in fr. 3 and of a third or empirical way in fragments 5 and 7, one way only remains. On this, she proceeds, there are many monuments or landmarks (σήματα), which (or some of which) she at once enumerates; they appear as predica tes of 'Being', the applicability of which is then established deductively. 8] COMMENTARY The main argument of fr.The Fragments of Parmenides, [193]–[194]
The change question is closely entangled with the monism question, and the same scholarly division reproduces itself here. The Standard Interpretation (Owen, Taran, Cornford in his strongest moods) reads the semata as a wholesale denial of change: the world of becoming is illusion. The opposing modal reading (Palmer) reads the semata as describing only necessary being and leaves the realm of contingent change genuinely real. Curd reads the predicational demand as consistent with multiple unchanging basic entities underlying apparent change, which is how she rehabilitates the post- Parmenidean pluralists. The historical evidence of what Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and the atomists thought I had said is itself contested: the traditional narrative reads them as responding to a doctrine of universal stasis; the newer reading sees them as applying my criterion to a plurality of basic entities.