{"agent_id":"parmenides","agent_name":"Parmenides","slug":"change-and-motion-in-what-is","label":"Change and motion in what-is: did I deny that change occurs anywhere, or only that necessary being can undergo it?","topic":"Change and motion in what-is","question":"Did I deny that change occurs anywhere, or only that necessary being can undergo it?","position":"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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"I did not write a sentence that denies the phenomenal world of becoming and motion.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"There is a difference between *not knowing what is contingent in the strict sense* and *denying that anything contingent occurs*.","n":[]},{"t":"The Doxa, mine in the sense already explained, is the cosmology of what contingently happens.","n":[]},{"t":"The route of *is* is the deductive treatment of what cannot, by its nature, be otherwise.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"B8.5-6 ('it never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one'); B8.26-31 ('motionless within the limits of great chains, it is unbeginning, unceasing... unmoved by mighty Necessity'); B8.38-41 ('therefore all those things will be names that mortals have established, convinced that they are real: coming to be and perishing, being and not being, changing place and altering bright color'); the entirety of B8.1-49 as the deduction of the *semata*. Reception: the post-Parmenidean pluralists (Anaxagoras's homoiomere, Empedocles's roots, Leucippus and Democritus's atoms) as the historical evidence about what they thought I had said about change; F. M. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides (1939); G. E. L. Owen, 'Eleatic Questions' (1960) — total denial of change; Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (1972); John Palmer, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy (2009) — the modal distinction, only necessary being is immobile; Patricia Curd, The Legacy of Parmenides (1998); Daniel Graham, Explaining the Cosmos (2006) on Parmenidean physics and its reception; Aristotle, Physics I.2-3 on the Parmenidean challenge.","works":["B8.5-6 ('it never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one')","B8.26-31 ('motionless within the limits of great chains, it is unbeginning, unceasing... unmoved by mighty Necessity')","B8.38-41 ('therefore all those things will be names that mortals have established, convinced that they are real: coming to be and perishing, being and not being, changing place and altering bright color')","the entirety of B8.1-49 as the deduction of the *semata*"],"reception":"the post-Parmenidean pluralists (Anaxagoras's homoiomere, Empedocles's roots, Leucippus and Democritus's atoms) as the historical evidence about what they thought I had said about change; F. M. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides (1939); G. E. L. Owen, 'Eleatic Questions' (1960) — total denial of change; Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (1972); John Palmer, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy (2009) — the modal distinction, only necessary being is immobile; Patricia Curd, The Legacy of Parmenides (1998); Daniel Graham, Explaining the Cosmos (2006) on Parmenidean physics and its reception; Aristotle, Physics I.2-3 on the Parmenidean challenge.","status":"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.","era":"c. 515 - c. 450 BCE","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Fragments of Parmenides","page":"pp. 317–318","canonical":"[197]–[198]","quote":"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.","label":"The Fragments of Parmenides, [197]–[198]"},{"n":2,"work":"The Fragments of Parmenides","page":"p. 313","canonical":"[193]–[194]","quote":"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.","label":"The Fragments of Parmenides, [193]–[194]"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-routes-at-b2","label":"The routes at B2: two ways or three, and is the distinction strict either/or or modal?"}]}