The generally repeated view of presocratic philosophy goes like this: the
preparmenideans produced a variety of ways of understanding the world and
our place in it, Parmenides argued that what they were trying to do was
impossible, and then the postparmenideans produced a different variety of
ways of doing what the preparmenideans had done while being careful to
respect the metaphysical requirements and prohibitions of Parmenides. In
The Legacy of Parmenides, Patricia Curd, arguing that this
generally repeated view is mistaken, provides a reinterpretation of
Parmenides which aims to account for the peculiar fact that, contrary to
what one might reasonably expect, not a single justification for
metaphysical pluralism survives in the remains of the postparmenidean
presocratics. This fact has often been recognized by contemporary
commentators as a rather loud silence given that the postparmenideans
clearly treated Parmenides' monistic argument with enormous respect.
Supposing, in other words, that the postparmenideans acknowledged that
Parmenides was right, and consequently that natural science, dealing as it
does with change, could not actually be done, how could and why would they
have troubled themselves to do what they actually did -- natural science?
David Guetter
The intriguing hypothesis advanced by Curd in this book is that the
Parmenidean remains can be interpreted in such a way as to be consistent
with postparmenidean pluralism. If so, then the fact that the
postparmenideans both acknowledged that Parmenides was right and engaged
in suitably modified natural science does not amount to a philosophical
lapse on their part. If Parmenides was in the same game as the others
were, natural philosophy, but less interested in rejecting cosmological
inquiry than in reforming it (p. 64), it's no wonder there aren't any
surviving postparmenidean presocratic arguments defending metaphysical
pluralism against Parmenidean monism: there was never any need for them,
because Parmenides never fundamentally challenged the legitimacy of
natural science in the first place, but only the assumption underlying the
various ways in which it had been done so far, namely the assumption that
real entities could change.
The book is divided into six chapters, the first three of which,
comprising about half of the book, concentrate upon Parmenides. The main
task of the first chapter, "Parmenides and the Inquiry into Nature," is to
argue that the impersonal verb esti in the first part of
Parmenides' poem, "Aletheia," or "On Truth," should be read in a
"predicative" rather than in an existential, veridical, or fused manner.
By this Curd intends "an informative identity claim, an assertion that,
when true, reveals the nature of a thing, saying what something is" (p.
39). This is later elaborated as follows: "If one understands what-is,
one understands it in its entirety, and anyone else's understanding of it
will be exactly the same" (ch. 2, p. 93). The predicational
interpretation of esti, she argues, "will allow us both to tell a
coherent story about the structure of the argument [in "Aletheia"]
and to see Parmenides as a crucial figure in the development of
Presocratic thought about cosmology and the nature of what-is" (p. 50).
In chapter two, "Parmenides' Monism and the Arguments of B8," Curd applies
the interpretive results of chapter one to the arguments of Fragment 8 in
particular. She here argues that Parmenides was a predicational and not a
numerical monist. A numerical monist, she says, is one who believes that
"only one thing can be;" a predicational monist, on the other hand, is one
who believes that "only what is one can be" (p. 73), or, less compactly,
"that each thing that is can be only one thing; it can hold only the one
predicate that indicates what it is, and must hold it in a particularly
strong way" (p. 66). It is a major claim of this chapter, and so in the
book as a whole, that predicational monism does not entail numerical
monism. If she is correct, then Parmenides' monism is "compatible with a
plurality of basic entities" (p. 65). Under this interpretation of
Parmenidean monism, "there is nothing to be explained away in the
Pluralists' response to Parmenides.... [T]he Pluralists' silence on the
issue of the number of their theoretically basic entities is not a problem
to be explained away but a confirmation that numerical pluralism is not
the target and numerical monism is not the point of Parmenides' arguments
(ch. 4, pp. 130-31).
In chapter three, "Doxa and Deception," Curd turns to the second
part of Parmenides' poem, "Doxa," or "On Opinion," which she
accepts as serious scientific theorizing on Parmenides' part. She takes
Parmenides here to be advocating a model -- though not the final word on
the subject -- of mixture and separation, but not of generation and
corruption, for theoretically basic entities in cosmological explanation:
"An account of the world as perceived by the senses that denies the
reality of change and ensures that its fundamental principles do not allow
for what-is-not could be allowed [by Parmenides]" (p. 125). What is
"deceptive" about this part of the poem is that "Light" and "Night" are
not in fact theoretically basic entities, since they are each what Curd
calls "enantiomorphs," i.e. entities which can be comprehended, and thus
can exist (see B3), only relative to their counterparts, such as right and
left, outer and inner, and so forth.
The second half of the book aims to show that and how the postparmenidean
presocratics followed the basic suggestions in "Doxa" for their
scientific theorizing while paying close attention to the metaphysical
requirements laid down in the argument of "Aletheia": the
Pluralists (Anaxagoras and Empedocles) are dealt with in chapter four,
"Pluralism after Parmenides," which includes a discussion of Zeno; the
Atomists (Leucippus and Democritus) in chapter five, "Atoms, Void, and
Rearrangement," which includes a discussion of Melissus; and Philolaus and
Diogenes in chapter six, "Final Remarks," which includes a discussion of
Plato, curiously called "the last presocratic." It is a recurrent theme
of these chapters that not one of these philosophers seems at all
concerned to argue for the existence of more than one theoretically basic
entity, as it seems they surely would have had Parmenides in fact argued
for ontological monism. Curd reads this unconcern on their parts as
"evidence that Parmenides was not concerned to argue for numerical monism"
(p. 171).
I enjoyed reading Curd's book and found it insightful and many of her
arguments compelling. There are two particular questions I wish to raise
for further thought. First, Curd interprets Zeno of Elea as "arguing
[not] against a numerical plurality of things that are, but rather against
the predicational divisibility of these things" (p. 172 n. 118), and
"[showing] that there are paradoxical consequences that follow from
thinking that a single [Parmenidean] nature can be in two places at once"
(p. 178). If Parmenides is to be understood as a collaborator in natural
philosophy, and his natures are to be thought of as somehow physical, why
could they not be in two distinct places at the same time, as left and
right sides of a bit of stuff, for instance? On the other hand, if these
natures are to be thought of as metaphysical, or perhaps linguistic, what
sense is there in allocating them even one place each?
Secondly, Curd wonders, in her discussion of atomism, "How is it that
void, emptiness in space, comes to be called [by the Atomists, via
Melissus] not-being and nothing?" Her suggestion is that a physical
compound comes to be from atoms, not from void, and that "that from which
nothing comes to be is itself nothing" (p. 205). But Parmenides might
reasonably demand to know the difference between "that from which nothing
comes to be is itself nothing" and "that from which nothing comes
to be is non-existent." For unless there is a real difference
between these the atomists cannot plausibly claim to have made the advance
they imagined they did.
One of the strengths of this book, in my opinion, is that it seems to be
aimed at quite a variety of audiences, all the way from typical
undergraduates studying the presocratics for the first time to researchers
whose interests include textual criticism. I expect, however, that this
feature may be regarded by some as a weakness. Also, there are copious
notes in each of the chapters and, although they are often informative, it
is easy to imagine some readers eventually finding them too intrusive and
believing that fewer could have sufficed. I'm referring, for example, to
those that say little more than "For views different from mine on this
point see author(s) A - n."
Overall, The Legacy of Parmenides shines an interpretive light upon
Parmenides which is very different from the usual view, while advancing
what seems to me to be both an engaging and a compelling argument in
general. It also contains a good many original comments and suggestions
concerning more limited points of scholarly debate. As such, it is in my
estimation the sort of landmark book which will not only be referred to
widely for a long while, it will also affect how the history of
presocratic philosophy is taught, making it a piece of scholarship that
contributes significantly to the field.
Mount Saint Vincent University
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Copyright ã 2002, Humboldt State University