The Route of Parmenides: A New Revised Edition with a New Introduction, Three Additional Essays and a Previously Unpublished Paper by Gregory Vlastos

Description

This study of the fragments of Parmenides' poem, "On Nature" (early 5th century b.c.e.), combines traditional philological reconstruction with the approaches of literary criticism and philosophical analysis to reveal the thought structure and expressive unity of the best preserved and most important, influential, and coherent text of Greek philosophy before Plato. Originally published in 1970 and widely cited and discussed since then in the literature on Parmenides and on the pre-Socratics, "The Route of Parmenides" has been out of print for nearly three decades. This new edition - the first in paperback - includes a new introduction, and it reprints three essays by the author that significantly enhance and extend the argument of the original edition. Also included is a previously unpublished essay by Gregory Vlastos, "Names of Being in Parmenides," which serves both as a complement and as a foil to the corresponding argument in Route. Combining the approaches of philosophical, philological, and literary analysis, Alexander Mourelatos examines the morphology of images and metaphors in the fragments of Parmenides' poem "On Nature" with the aim of articulating and interpreting the poem's key concepts and component arguments. Relevant antecedents and parallels from the tradition of epic poetry, especially of Homer's Odyssey, are explored in depth. Apart from the contribution the book makes toward understanding Parmenides' thought, it offers philosophically substantial analyses of the Greek concept of aletheia, "truth, reality," and of the thematically important cluster of Greek terms that center, respectively, on the concepts of "persuasion" (peithein, pistis, peitho) and "seeming/belief" (dokein, doxa).