Parmenides' View

He was born about 515 and was possibly a student of Xenophanes and studied with Pythagoreans. He is said to be one of the most controversial figures among the presocratics. He says that genuine thought and knowledge can be only about what is, for what is not is literally unsayable and unthinkable. What IS must be whole, complete, unchanging and one. In response to claiming the changing world is unreal, he gives us a cosmological account by a goddes named Doxa (beliefs/opinions) who claims to be deceptive in her account. He basically takes the Heraclitus view to the extreme in that everything is one in the same. Instead of in flux, everything is unchanging because it is one in the same and it is an unreal human distinction to think otherwise.

Straightforwardly, he gives us four characteristics of Being: imperishable, pure presence/eternal, unchanging, and all together/one/continuous. This Being is only accessible to pure thinking. Again, this view may seem the most far-fetched and bizarre, but it must be understood that he was one of the first philosopher's to separate his philosophical works as a conceptual analyst from real life experience. It would be a bad idea to try to live out his concepts. It wouldn't work in the slightest. I find it very courageous for him to take on such a philosophically radical concept in that it was so different from any of the other presocratics. I definitely see how Plato's forms were influenced by this theory of Being, he just took the one continuous Being and made them into many continuous unchanging Beings.