Eleatic School of Philosophy: Key Ideas

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:45

Philosophy, the science of thinking, acquired its principles in antiquity. The basic concepts of the possibilities and methods of human cognition were formed in the schools of ancient Greek philosophy. The development of thinking in its history follows the well-known triad: thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Thesis is a certain statement characteristic of a given historical period.

Antithesis is the negation of the initial principle by finding contradictions in it.

Synthesis is the assertion of a principle based on a new level of historical form of thinking.

The logic of development can be traced both in the history of the formation of thinking, and in the system of formation of a concept characteristic of a certain historical form, whether it be a school or a direction in the rational development of the world. The historical period when the Eleatic school of philosophy was formed was characterized by a pro-materialistic approach to cognition. The teaching of the Pythagoreans about the physical principle in nature became the thesis for the formation of the own teaching of the Eleans.

Eleatic School of Philosophy: Teachings

In 570 BC The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes disprovedthe polytheistic doctrine of God characteristic of this era and substantiated the principle of the unity of Being.

This principle was subsequently consistently developed by his students, and the direction entered the history of science as the Eleatic School of Philosophy. Briefly, the teachings of representatives can be reduced to the following theses:

• Being is one.
• Multiple is not reducible to a single, illusory.
• Experience does not give reliable knowledge of the world.

The teachings of the Elyos representatives cannot be put into certain theses. It is much richer. Any teaching is a living process of knowing the truth or falsity of existing statements through the prism of experience. As soon as the philosophical approach to the knowledge of nature and society takes shape as a concept, it becomes the subject of critical analysis and further denial.

Exegesis

Therefore, there is a certain style of interpreting views called exegesis. It is also, as in ancient times, determined by history, culture, the type of thinking of the era, the author's approach of the researcher. Therefore, in philosophy, canonization is impossible, since the forms of thought, clothed in words, immediately lose their basic principle of negation. The same teaching within the framework of different paradigms changes its meaning.

Eleatic school of philosophy, the main ideas of which were interpreted differently in historical periods, proof of this fact. What is important is the expediency of the ratio of the paradigm in the parameters of which the study takes place and the very purpose of the study.phenomenon.

Key representatives of the school

Representatives of a certain school of philosophy are thinkers of the historical era, united by a single principle, and extrapolating it to a subject-limited area of human knowledge: religion, society, state.

Some historiographers include the philosopher Xenophanes among the representatives of the school, others limit it to three followers. All historical approaches have a right to exist. In any case, the basis of the doctrine of the unity of Being was formulated by Xenophanes of Colophon, declaring that the unity is God, who controls the Universe with his thought.

Representatives of the Eleatic school of philosophy: Parmenides, Zeno and Meliss, developing the principle of unity, explicated it in the spheres of nature, thinking, faith. They were the successors of the Pythagorean teaching, and on the basis of the critical development of the thesis about the material fundamental principle of the world, they formulated the antithesis about the One nature of Being and the metaphysical nature of things. This served as a starting point for subsequent schools and directions in the development of philosophy. What does "one nature" mean? And what was the main content contributed by each of the representatives of the school?

Thesis of the teachings of the school

The Eleatic school of ancient philosophy, for which the category of Genesis became the central concept of teaching, formed the postulate of the static and immutable nature of existence. Truth is available to the knowledge of the mind, in experience only an erroneous opinion about the properties of nature is formed - this is what the Eleatic school of philosophy teaches. Parmenides introducedthe concept of "Being", which has become central to world philosophical understanding.

The provisions formed by Zeno in his "Aporias", which became a household name, reveal the principle of contradiction in case of recognizing the plurality and variability of the surrounding world. Melissus, in his treatise on nature, summed up all the views of his predecessors and brought them out as a dogmatic teaching, known as "Hellenic".

Parmenides on Nature

Parmenides of Elea was of noble origin, his morality was recognized by the townspeople, suffice it to say that he was a legislator in his policy.

This first representative of the Eleatic school wrote his work "On Nature". The thesis about the material beginning of the world, characteristic of the Pythagoreans, became the basis of the critical teachings of Parmenides, and he developed the idea of unity in different fields of knowledge.

The thesis of the Pythagoreans about the search for a single principle in nature, Parmenides postulates an antithesis about the plurality of Being and the illusory nature of things. The Eleatic school of philosophy is briefly presented in his treatise.

He actually discovered the postulate of rational knowledge of the world. The external perception of the surrounding reality, according to his teaching, is unreliable, limited only by the individual experience of a person. "Man is the measure of everything" - the famous saying of Parmenides. It testifies to the limitations of personal experience and the impossibility of reliable knowledge based on personal perception.

Aporias of Zeno

Eleatic school of philosophy in the teachings of Zeno of Elea received confirmation from Parmenides about the impossibility of comprehending nature in change, movement and discreteness. He gives 40 aporias - insoluble contradictions in natural phenomena.

Nine of these aporias are still the subject of discussion and debate. The principle of dichotomy underlying the movement in the “Arrow” aporia does not allow the arrow to catch up with the tortoise… These aporias became the subject of analysis of Aristotle’s teachings.

Meliss

A contemporary of Zeno, a student of Parmenides, this ancient Greek philosopher expanded the concept of Being to the level of the Universe and was the first to raise the question of its infinity in space and time.

There are opinions that he personally communicated with Heraclitus. But, in contrast to the well-known materialist of Ancient Greece, he did not recognize the material fundamental principle of the world, denied the categories of movement and change as the basis for the emergence and destruction of material things.

“Existing” in his interpretation is eternal, always was, did not arise from anything and does not disappear anywhere. In his treatise, he united the views of his predecessors and left the teachings of the Eleatics to the world in a dogmatic form.

Followers of the Eleatic School

Eleatic school of philosophy, the basic principles and concepts of which in the teachings of the Eleatics became the starting point, thesis, for the further development of philosophical thought. The doctrine of Parmenides about opinion is presented in the dialogues of Socrates and later became the basis for the teaching of the school of sophistry. The idea of separating Being andNothing was the basis for Plato's doctrine of ideas. The aporias of Zeno served as the subject of the great Aristotle's research on the consistency of thought and the impetus for writing the multi-volume Logic.

Meaning for the history of philosophy

The Eleatic school of ancient Greek philosophy is significant for the history of the formation of philosophical thought in that it was its representatives who first introduced the central category of philosophy "Being", as well as ways of rational comprehension of this concept.

Known as the "father of logic", the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle later called Zeno the first dialectician.

Dialectics - the science of the unity of opposites, received in the XVIII the status of the methodology of philosophical knowledge. It was thanks to the Eleatics that questions were first raised about the truth of rational knowledge and the unreliability of an opinion based on personal judgments and experimental perception of reality.

In the later, classical, period of the formation of science, the relation of being and thinking as the main philosophical categories became a universal principle, on the basis of which the spheres of ontology and epistemology were delimited.

In the history of philosophical thought, the posing of questions is a more important element of cognition, from the point of view of development, than the options for finding answers to questions. Because the question always points to the limits of our possibilities, and therefore the prospect of rational search.