Читать книгу A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy онлайн

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But what can we say of the varied world of nature as it appears to us? Do we see, hear, and touch many things and motions? In PartII of his poem he raises the question, Suppose man takes the world of change as real how must he explain it? He answers by using the explanation of Heracleitus. But these changes of eye and ear belong to the world of sense, and Parmenides is talking, in PartI of his poem, about the real world or that world known to thought. Parmenides insists as strongly as did Heracleitus that the reason and not the sense shall be our guide to what is real. Yet he arrives at exactly the opposite conclusion from Heracleitus as to what the reason sees as real. The senses show us only the many and the changing. The reason shows us nothing of the sort, but only permanence and unchangingness.

Zeno

Zeno was born in Elea. He was contemporary with those who tried to reconcile the two sides of the metaphysical controversy,—Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists. He wrote in prose in the form of question and answer. This is the beginning of the dialogue literature, which in the time of the Sophists, Socrates and Plato, was richly developed and became known as dialectic. On the Greek stage during the time of Pericles it came forth in dramatic form through Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.