Eleatics - History, Philosophy

A group of presocratic Greek philosophers in the 5th-c BC, from Elea in S Italy. In contrast to the more empirical Milesians, Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno initiated a metaphysical tradition based on deductive argument, which greatly influenced Plato and subsequent philosophers.

The Eleatics were a school of pre-Socratic philosophers at Elea, a Greek colony in Lucania, Italy. Other members of the school included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos.

History

The school took its name from Elea, a Greek city of lower Italy, the home of its chief exponents, Parmenides and Zeno. Its foundation is often attributed to Xenophanes of Colophon, but, although there is much in his speculations which formed part of the later Eleatic doctrine, it is probably more correct to regard Parmenides as the founder of the school.

Xenophanes had made the first attack on the mythology of early Greece in the middle of the 6th century, including an attack against the whole anthropomorphic system enshrined in the poems of Homer and Hesiod.

Philosophy

The Eleatics rejected the epistemological validity of sense experience, and instead took mathematical standards of clarity and necessity to be the criteria of truth.

The main doctrines of the Eleatics were evolved in opposition to the theories of the early physicalist philosophers, who explained all existence in terms of primary matter, and to the theory of Heraclitus, which declared that all existence may be summed up as perpetual change. The Eleatics maintained that the true explanation of things lies in the conception of a universal unity of being.

Though the conclusions of the Eleatics were rejected by the later Presocratics and Aristotle, their arguments were taken seriously, and they are generally credited with improving the standards of discourse and argument in their time. Their influence was likewise longlasting -- Gorgias, a Sophist, argued in the style of the Eleatics in his work "On Nature or What Is Not," and Plato acknowledged them in the Parmenides, the Sophist and the Politicus. Furthermore, much of the later philosophy of the ancient period borrowed from the methods and principles of the Eleatics.