Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: The notion of continuity in Parmenides 1 1.Introduction: Being suneches, being continuous, is a central notion in Aristotle's Physics, and of crucial importance for understanding time, space, and motion within Aristotle's framework.In this paper I want to show that continuity is, however, already of crucial philosophical significance in Parmenides, who seems to be the first thinker in the West to use the notion of continuity in a philosophically interesting and systematic way.But Parmenides uses it in a way that is importantly different from Aristotle with opposing implications.The notion of suneches itself has not attracted much attention from Parmenides scholars (even though the passages in which Parmenides talks about suneches have, and their understanding is highly disputed).2 What I will do in this paper is to look first in some detail at the three passages in fragment 8 of Parmenides' poem that are of crucial importance for Parmenides' notion of being suneches before comparing it briefly to Aristotle's notion.An analysis of these three passages in Parmenides will show that suneches for Parmenides implies complete homogeneity and indivisibility.The three passages I look at are (1) fragment 8, lines 5-6a, where Parmenides calls what is (eon) "suneches" for the first time and links being suneches and being homou ('being together').(2) Lines 22-25 show being suneches to exclude differences in kind as well as any more or less.(3) Lines 42-49, finally, even though not using the word "suneches", can be understood as taking up the discussion of conditions that would prevent eon from being suneches and as systematizing these conditions.The argument of this passage shows that what would prevent eon from being suneches is either non-Being or unequally distributed Being.The analysis of these three passages will be the basis for explaining why suneches is understood very differently in Parmenides' poem and Aristotle's Physics.I want to argue that these differences can ultimately be traced back to different starting points and to different understandings of what we would call the principle of sufficient reason.Being suneches literally means "holding together".One of the questions discussed in the literature is how this holding together can be understood -whether things are temporally 1 Alexander Mourelatos seems to me to be a rare combination of the virtues of a terrific scholar with extreme modesty, fairness, kindness, and Lebensfreude.An expression of this combination I already encountered when I first met Alex at a conference on Plato's Timaeus that Richard Mohr, Kirk Sanders and I had organized at the University of Urbana-Champaign in 2007.There Alex not only gave a wonderfully subtle paper on the eikôs mythos, but he also made sure that young scholars got good treatment and loosened up the conference atmosphere in the most enchanting way with his after dinner singing performance.Furthermore, it seems to me that the field of Parmenides Studies in the Anglophone world of today cannot be thought of without his highly influential book, The Route of Parmenides -while not all of us may agree on Alex's interpretation, none of us can write on Parmenides without consulting it.It is a pleasure to dedicate this paper to him. 2 Part of the problem here is that by looking at these passages we immediately get dragged into questions about the structure of the whole poem.
Source: Philosophical Inquiry
Authors: Barbara M. Sattler, Philosophical Inquiry
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2785169592