Parmenides is sometimes thought of as the father of metaphysics. He is the first philosopher of the abstract notion of being, and as such even many contemporary issues in metaphysics go back to some basic concepts in his poem, written nearly 2600 years ago, and of which we only have several fragments. The currently hot topic of metaphysical monism is just one which traces back to Parmenides. Others include the problems of nonexistent things and attendant notions of not-being, the nature of false statement, the nature of identity, the issue of appearances and reality, and the very concept of being anything at all. His concern is the fundamental nature of reality, and in terms of metaphysics and epistemology, logic and the nature of language, he is indeed what Plato called him explicitly: both Father and the One. But Parmenides—perhaps by virtue of being the first, a watershed in Western thought—stumbles out of the gate. It is not by virtue of espousing or employing faulty concepts, such as the notions of generation and perishing, wholeness, oneness, and completeness, that Parmenides stumbles. It is by virtue of a strict adherence to a bivalent logic, which pits absolute being and absolute not-being against one another. Parmenides’ adherence to this bivalence effectually disallows a main part of his philosophy: the admonishment of mortal opinions by way of eradicating the very things—sensibles—those opinions are of. When Plato confronts Father Parmenides, he does so from the perspective of one who sees that in order to admonish opinion, one must also take into account the sensible world; explication, not eradication, is the foundation of Plato’s confrontation with Parmenides. In so doing, however, Plato never fully abandons his Eleatic roots. He agrees that the reality must be a singular and whole; but he moves beyond Parmenides in arguing that such a single reality must be really divisible, if sensibles are to make sense.
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