Parmenides, Melissus and Gorgias. A Reinterpretation of Eleatic Philosophy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 255 Part II is devoted to the theory of right and conscience. In it there is a similar treatment of divine commandments, Kantian categorical imperatives, the deontologists and the "ideal utilitarians." Part IV is devoted to the theory of human community and social ideas. The two chapters of Part III on cultural relativity and analytical scepticism seem to me to be really a methodological introduction to Part IV, explaining very carefully how a humanism based on universal ideals is a reasonable (anti-absolutistic) cultural relativism applied to mankind generally. It seems to me that this delicate theoretical balance would be enforced if Rader made a theoretical distinction between universal human needs or "moral requiremerits " and particular common values or ideals. Be that as it may, he rests his humanism on this double appreciation and evaluation of the basic conditions necessary for human wellbeing , among which he emphasizes the diversity of cultural standards and consciences. His constant use of the classics in expounding the three factors of moral life (excellence, right, and ideals) is clever as well as critical, for it serves to bring the past into the present, where it belongs and where it serves to shape and sharpen contemporary concepts and issues. If it were important and if there were more space and time for it, I would like to disagree with him a bit in his interpretations of some of the classics. I am surprised, for example, that with his fine emphasis on mutuality and on reciprocity Rader passes by those wonderful chapters on friend~ip in Aristotle's Ethics. It seems to me also that he overemphasizes Hobbes' individualism and underestimates Spinoza's contrast between the ethics of bondage and the ethics of freedom. But such differences of interpretation do not affect my admiration for the basic merit of Rader's method: the separate development of the theory of happiness and the theory of conscience, and his skillful use of both in his critique of human ideals. In this last and culminating part of the work Rader gives special attention to the social ideals of Hegel, Marx, Rousseau, Mill, Durkheim, Bergson, and Feuerbach (following roughly his order in the text). His use of Feuerbach seems to me noteworthy, for it gives Feuerbach a post-Marxian as well as a pre-Marxian role, pointing out that such humanism serves to formulate ideals of human community that not only survive times of crisis but positively emerge from them. HERnERT W. SCHNEmER Claremont, Cali]ornia Parmenides, Melissus and Gorgias. A Reinterpretation of Eleatic Philosophy. By J.H.M.1V[. Loenen. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1959. Pp 207.) Loenen claims early on in his book that his interpretation of Eleatic philosophy differs widely from other interpretations hitherto offered. He says that the originality of his "revolutionary interpretation" lies in three of its essential elements: the first is his firm belief that the term ~r in Parmenides Melissus and Gorgias has a "Platonic" content, in so far as it expresses the absolute mode of being of which eternity and immutability are the principal characteristics. The second, ("the fundamental thesis of his study") is that at its first starting-point Eleaticism assigns an absolute mode of being to a subject, namely, to the indefinite subject ~-L.The third is his view of Parmenides as an "epistemologieal metaphysician" (in contrast with Melissus, whom he describes as a "deductive metaphysician"), and as not a monist, but a dualist, who differed from other dualists in that he severed all causal relation between true being and the phenomenal world. I begin with Loenen's attempt to supply a subject for the ~ar~ and ob~ ~ar~ of ft.2 (T}~ ~ ~a~ ~} ~[~aL,/ . . . ["The one way, that it is and cannot not-be,is the path of persuasion for it attends upon truth: the other, that it is-not and needs must not-be,..."]). In sketching the interpretations hitherto offered as to the subject of ~r,, Loenen dismisses the view that ~rL has no subject (as suggested by Fr/~nkel? for example) on the same grounds as are given by Verdenius 2 Parmenidesstudien p. 188; n3. Parmenides, some comments on his Poem. 256 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and Owen3...