The Language of Being, the Language of Nature: Parmenides and His Reception

Parmenides is not just the first thinker to ever consider the notion of being in itself in Greek thought. He also associates this Being with a specific kind of knowledge (Aletheia) and a specific “persuasive” language that would account for it. Indeed, his poem constitutes our first document in the philosophical tradition that presents deductive arguments in Greek philosophy. This innovation explains why several critics consider Parmenides to be either the first philosopher, if one defines philosophy by its use of a certain kind of argument, or at least the one who gave philosophy a new starting point. However, Parmenides’ language is not entirely innovative, both because of his use of epic hexameters and style and because of the physical description of the world that follows the examination of being, which is similar to what we may find in previous Pre-Socratic thought.

For a long time, the studies on Parmenides and his reception have focused almost exclusively on the question of being itself and its nature. In this conference, we intend to concentrate on Parmenides’ language, in all its dimensions (stylistic, argumentative, rhetorical, predicative…). Our aim is to see both how this approach may bring new perspectives on much-discussed issues like the relationship between Being and Nature, Truth and Opinions, and how Parmenides’ kind of reasoning shaped the language that philosophy, in particular ontology or metaphysics, used in later thought, which includes Parmenides’ immediate successors up to late Antiquity.