Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy (review)

John Palmer, author of Plato’s Reception of Parmenides (Oxford, 1999), here essays a radically new interpretation of Parmenides and his relation to Presocratic predecessors and successors, challenging received Anglo-American views (Heidegger and his epigones are ignored) on numerous fronts. Palmer sees the prevailing narrative in the first two volumes of Guthrie’s History as modified by Owen, Barnes, and Kirk/Raven/Schofield, and means not to revise but to overturn it (although on his own account, especially of recent scholarship on the early thinkers and their relations, it is not clear that this has not already substantially occurred). Moreover, he means us to abandon entirely the dominant belief that Parmenides is a watershed between two eras in Greek cosmology, with his goddess’s elenchus bringing one type to an end and setting forth a kind of prolegomenon to any future cosmology. This elenchus, so the consensus roughly goes, is something her own account of mortals’ views in the poem’s Doxa intentionally fails to satisfy (leaving the purpose and status of this cosmology in doubt), while Zeno defends, Melissus expands, and Empedocles and Anaxagoras either oppose or attempt to fulfill her criteria. Palmer will have none of this, and several concluding chapters offer his rebuttal to that view of later developments.

Central to his study is an interpretation of Parmenides himself as not a strict but a “generous monist.” After an introductory chapter on the historical context, he begins his treatment of the poem, in chapters 2 to 4, with a fairly extensive discussion of its introduction (DK B1), rejecting the allegorical interpretation of the journey as an ascent to enlightenment and viewing it instead as a katabasis, culminating in Palmer’s dubious identification of Parmenides’s nameless goddess as Night. The core of his interpretation focuses and builds on DK B2, which apparently begins the section of the poem commonly referred to as “the Way of Truth” (more properly, “Truth”) but which Palmer prefers to call “the Way of Conviction.” In this fragment he leaves the notoriously subject-less ‘estin’ as is, taking it as a modal verb designating necessary being. In so construing Parmenides’s ‘estin’ or ‘to eon,’ Palmer bypasses interpretative options traceable to Russell’s influence and contemporary debates over existential/predicative/veridical senses of the Greek verb ‘to be,’ offering in their place a “modal interpretation of Parmenides,” with a tripartite ontological distinction corresponding to three ways of inquiry: that of non-wandering thought, as urged by the goddess, into “what is and cannot not be”; that of impossibility, into “what is not and must not be”; and that of wandering mortals, into “what is but need not be.”

Fleshing out this last will be one of the more controversial aspects of Palmer’s study, for notwithstanding the goddess’s exhortations to stay away from this path, Palmer insists that “it is apparently not altogether wrong to follow it” (106). In effect, so long as one pays lip service to necessary being as the sole route of non-wandering thought, one is free to pursue a cosmology of the contingent world, and this he sees the goddess undertaking in Doxa.

Surprisingly, given his modal interpretation, Palmer has almost nothing to say about the semantics of the key verb ‘chrē,’ which he renders as “it is necessary,” despite countervailing research suggesting it is better translated “it is right/appropriate/meet,” which might lead in other interpretative directions. More importantly, Palmer’s necessary being is not identified with mind, nor is it divine, nor does it act in any way on the contingent mortal world, but is merely coterminous with it; thus, one must ask what inquiry into such being might involve, and why that should be attractive, because it is as impersonal and empty as it is trustworthy. Aristotle’s otherwise puzzling failure to recognize this supposed central principle of Parmenides’s doctrine Palmer attributes to lost works.

Chapters 5 to 7 examine Zeno and Melissus, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles, with close attention to...