_ Source: _Volume 60, Issue 1, pp 3 - 39 This paper pursues a new approach to the problem of the relation between Alētheia and Doxa. It investigates as interrelated matters Parmenides’ impetus for developing and including Doxa, his conception of the mortal epistemic agent in relation both to Doxa’s investigations and to those in Alētheia, and the relation between mortal and divine in his poem. Parmenides, it is argued, maintained that Doxastic cognition is an ineluctable and even appropriate aspect (...) of mortal life. The mortal agent, however, is nonetheless capable of sustaining the cognition of Alētheia by momentarily coming to think with—or as—his divine soul. (shrink)

This page is dedicated to an analysis of the first section of Parmenides' Poem, the Way of Truth, with a selection of critical judgments by the most important commentators and critics. In the Annotated Bibliography I list the main critical editions (from the first printed edition of 1573 to present days) and the translations in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, with a selection of studies on Parmenides; in future, a section will be dedicated to an examination of some critical (...) variants of the Greek text, with particular attention to corrections to the Diels-Kranz (abbreviated DK) edition of the Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. The fragments of Parmenides' Poem are cited according to Diels-Kranz numbering system as adopted in the 6th edition, Berlin 1952; the Poem is divided into three parts: the Proem fr. I, 1-32; the Way of Truth (Alethéia) from fr. II to VIII, 49, and the Way of Mortal Opinion (Doxa) fr. VIII, 50 to XIX, 3. (shrink)

Are all forms of difference contained in what is, or is there some form of difference that escapes, negates, or constitutes what is? Parmenides and Heraclitus may have had the greatest effect on how philosophy has answered this question. This paper shows that Heraclitus is not a partisan of difference: identity and difference are mutually generative and equally fundamental. For his part, Parmenides both makes an argument against opposing being and non-being in the False Road Story, and then uses precisely (...) this opposition to put up signs on the Way of Truth. The paper responds to this impasse by making the case that the poem’s philosophical character is didactic, rhetorical, and mythological, which is why both these signs, and the opposition between non-being and being, are presented as names created by mortals. (shrink)

This essay aims to analyse the Parmenides’ interpretation that Laura Gemelli Marciano offered in the Eleatica lectures. The scholar represents the Parmenidean Poem as a mystical experience where sounds, words and images communicate and produce a real approach to the divine reality at the same time. This intriguing reading, which closely follows that offered by Kingsley, understimates the problems and cognitive structures of rational thought in the poem. Thus Parmenides appears to be a shaman rather a philosopher.