Patricia Curd

Parmenides of Elea was the most important and influential philosopher before Plato. Patricia Curd here reinterprets Parmenides' views and offers a new account of his relation to his predecessors and successors.

In the traditional interpretation, Parmenides argues that generation, destruction, and change are unreal and that only one thing exists. He therefore rejected as impossible the scientific inquiry practiced by the earlier Presocratic philosophers. But the philosophers who came after Parmenides attempted to explain natural change and they assumed the reality of a plurality of basic entities. Thus, on the traditional interpretation, the later Presocratics either ignored or contradicted his arguments. In this book, Patricia Curd argues that Parmenides sought to reform rather than to reject scientific inquiry and offers a more coherent account of his influence on the philosophers who cameafter him.

The Legacy of Parmenides provides a detailed examination of Parmenides' arguments, considering his connection to earlier Greek thought and how his account of "what-is" could serve as model for later philosophers. It then considers the theories of those who came after him, including the Pluralists (Anaxagoras and Empedocles), the Atomists (Leucippus and Democritus), the later Eleatics (Zeno and Melissus), and the later Presocratics (Philolaus of Croton and Diogenes of Apollonia). The book closes with a discussion of the importance of Parmenides' views for the development of Plato's Theory of Forms.

This first-time in paperback edition includes a new Introduction by the author in which she clarifies her position on the following points: Monism, Internal and External Negations, Locomotion and the Specification of How What-is Is, and Doxa. Also added is a Supplementary Bibliography. (The Legacy of Parmenides was first published in hardcover in 1997 by Princeton University Press.)

"Professor Curd offers a genuinely original and possibly correct interpretation of the core thesis of the poem of Parmenides in a field so well worked over that saying something both new and true is profoundly difficult, this is a notable achievement."

—Thomas M. Robinson
University of Toronto

"This will be a substantial book in the story of early Greek philosophy, and future writers on the tradition from Thales through Plato will not be able to ignore it without missing an important interpretive alternative. It will be of value to students of Presocratic philosophy or the Greek tradition, as well as to students of the scientific revolution, cosmology, the origins of logic, or comparative mysticism."

—Scott W. Austin
Texas A&M University

Curd's central thesis is that Parmenides is a "predicational" and not a "numerical" monist: he believes that whatever is real (a "nature") is one, and not, as many have thought, that there exists only a single thing and that all multiplicity is therefore deceptive.

[Her] argument for her interpretation of Parmenides' monism is clear, elegant and powerful. More important, she presents a convincing account of Parmenides' general philosophical project, and makes that project reasonable and understandable. Curd's Parmenides ist not a prophet, he does not enjoy paradoxes for their own sake; he is not in the grip of elementary confusion. He is a serious philosopher, who takes his predecessors seriously, and issues a justified challenge to their way of understanding the world. His successors understood his challenge and tried to meet it appropriately.

The Legacy of Parmenides represents a milestone along the way of Parmenides' interperation. It is full of ideas and tells a coherent story about Parmenides and early Greek thought.

—Alexander Nehamas
Princeton University… (altro)