Ontology and Doxa. On Parmenides’ Dual Strategies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47661/afcl.v14i28.38766Keywords:
Parmenides, Monism, Dualism, Ontology, Truth, DoxaAbstract
Starting from Reinhardt’s interpretive instruction to take into account both parts of the poem of Parmenides in order to achieve a sufficient understanding of his philosophy, this paper aims to re-evaluate the state of recent scholarship, and to propose an approach that reveals the “dualistic methodology” at the heart of Parmenides’ philosophy. The ontological monism of Truth emerges as grounded in the dualistic projection of the concepts of Being and Nothing. The dualism of Doxa, structured upon the forms of Light and Night, evolves by producing a further duality: the erroneous opinions that separate the two forms have to be replaced by the appropriate cosmological world-order of their mixture. Finally, the poem as a whole, in its two parts, reflects a deeper duality, which signifies the profound distance that separates the human from the divine. The importance of all these binary structures compels us to re-examine the consideration of Parmenides as champion of a blind monism.References
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