CLU33385 Greek Philosophy

All European philosophy, the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously alleged, is merely a series of footnotes to Plato. But “Plato’s own writings” themselves, David Gallop has appended, “might be said to have consisted in footnotes to Parmenides of Elea” (Gallop (1984) 3). In this module we study the fragments of Parmenides and the legacy of his extraordinary poem during the first century of its reception in the work of the so-called Eleatics, Zeno and Melissus, whose differing responses to Parmenides and his critics both bestowed an afterlife for Eleaticism and inspired further critical responses during the fifth century BC. In part one, we read Parmenides’ contentious poem closely; in part two, we then consider ‘Eleatic’ responses to it, reading our evidence for the paradoxes of Zeno and the radical monistic prose treatise of Melissus, before turning to Gorgias’ nihilistic parody of Eleaticism and its further serio-comic afterlives at the hands of the (Platonic) sophists and fifth-century dramatists.