Notes

Heraclitus (fl. c. 500 B.C.E.)
https://www.iep.utm.edu/heraclit/
Theory of Knowledge
Heraclitus sees the great majority of human beings as lacking understanding
While sense experience seems necessary for understanding, if we do not know the right language, we cannot interpret the information the senses provide
"The things of which there is sight, hearing, experience, I prefer" (DK22B55)
"Poor witnesses for men are their eyes and ears if they have barbarian souls" (DK22B107)
Heraclitus sees his own expressions as imitations of the world with its structural and semantic complexity
"The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign" (DK22B93)
Similarly, Heraclitus does not reveal or conceal, but produces complex expressions that have encoded in them multiple messages for those who can interpret them.
He uses puns, paradoxes, antitheses, parallels, and various rhetorical and literary devices to construct expressions that have meanings beyond the obvious.
Heraclitus stresses the inductive rather than the deductive method of grasping the world, a world that is rationally structured, if we can but discern its shape.
To read Heraclitus the reader must solve verbal puzzles, and to learn to solve these puzzles is to learn to read the signs of the world.
The Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites
Heraclitus does not hold Universal Flux, but recognizes a lawlike flux of elements
On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow. (DK22B12)
The sentence says that different waters flow in rivers staying the same.
The message is that rivers can stay the same over time even though, or indeed because, the waters change.
The point is
that some things change makes possible the continued existence of other things
not that everything is changing
Heraclitus does not hold the Identity of Opposites, but the Transformational Equivalence of Opposites
As the same thing in us is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and conversely those having changed around are these. (DK22B88)
The second sentence in B88 gives the explanation for the first.
If F is the same as G because F turns into G, then the two are not identical.
"Cold things warm up, the hot cools off, wet becomes dry, dry becomes wet" (DK22B126)
Heraclitus insists on the common-sense truth of change.
This sort of mutual change presupposes the non-identity of the terms.
What Heraclitus wishes to maintain is not the identity of opposites but the fact that they replace each other in a series of transformations: they are interchangeable or transformationally equivalent.
Physical Theory
This world-order, the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures. (DK22B30)
This passage contains the earliest extant philosophical use of the word kosmos, "world-order," denoting the organized world in which we live, with earth, sea, atmosphere, and heavens.
The world itself does not have a beginning or end
Parts of it are being consumed by fire at any given time, but the whole remains.
As the stuffs turn into one another, the world itself remains stable
We can recognize a primitive law of conservation-not precisely conservation of matter, at least the identity of the matter is not conserved, nor of mass, but at least an equivalence of matter is maintained
Heraclitus rejects the view that cosmic justice is designed to punish one opposite for its transgressions against another
If some things did not die, others would not be born
Conflict does not interfere with life, but rather is a precondition of life.
Moral and Political Theory
Heraclitus views the soul as fiery in nature
Soul is generated out of other substances just as fire is. But it has a limitless dimension
To souls it is death to become water, to water death to become earth, but from earth water is born, and from water soul. (DK22B36)
If you went in search of it, you would not find the boundaries of the soul, though you traveled every road-so deep is its measure [logos]. (DK22B45)
The laws of a city-state are an important principle of order
The people [of a city] should fight for their laws as they would for their city wall. (DK22B44)
The laws provide a defense for a city and its way of life.
Heraclitus recognizes a divine unity behind the cosmos, one that is difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to separate from the processes of the cosmos:
The wise, being one thing only, would and would not take the name of Zeus [or: Life]. (DK22B32)

Parmenides of Elea (Late 6th cn.—Mid 5th cn. B.C.E.)
https://www.iep.utm.edu/parmenid/
Parmenides’ Poem
No copy of the original work has survived, in any part.
The reconstructed arrangement is a rather fragmentary text, constituted by approximately 154 dactylic-hexameter lines
a. The Proem (C/DK 1.1-32)
The Proem opens mid-action, with a first-person account of an unnamed youth (generally taken to be Parmenides himself) traveling along a divine path to meet a didactic (also unnamed) goddess.
The youth describes himself riding in a chariot with fire-blazing wheels turning on pipe-whistling axles, which seems to be traversing the heavens.
The chariot is drawn by mares, steered by the Daughters of the Sun (the Heliades), who began their journey at the House of Night.
The party eventually arrives at two tightly-locked, bronze-fitted gates—the Gates of Night and Day.
In order to pass through these “aethereal” gates, the Heliades must persuade Justice to unlock the doors with soft words.
After successfully passing through this portal and driving into the yawning maw beyond, the youth is finally welcomed by the unnamed goddess, and the youth’s first-person account ends.
Rather than a metaphorical ascent towards enlightenment, the youth’s journey is actually a didactic katabasis (a descent into the underworld)
The standard reconstruction of the Proem concludes with the two most difficult and controversial lines in Parmenides’ poem (C 1.31-32):
ἀλλ’ ἔμπης καὶ ταῦτα μαθήσεαι ὡς τὰ δοκεῦντα ### χρῆν δοκίμος εἴναι διὰ παντὸς πάντα περῶντα [περ ὄντα].
But nevertheless, you shall also learn “these things,” how the “accepted/seeming things” should/would have had (to be) to be acceptably, passing through [just being] all things, altogether/in every way.
Interpretations
Parmenides might be offering an explanation for why it is important to learn about mortal opinions if they are so untrustworthy/unreliable
Parmenides might be telling the youth he will learn counterfactually how the opinions of mortals (or the objects of such opinions) would or could have been correct (even though they were not and are not now)
Parmenides might be pointing to some distinct, third thing for the youth to learn, beyond just Reality and Opinion
b. Reality (C 2-8.50)
The youth is supposed to learn some truth about “reality” (aletheia)
Contains Parmenides’ positively endorsed epistemic and metaphysical claims
The youth is first informed that there are only two logically possible “routes of inquiry” one might embark upon in order to understand “reality”
Parmenides’ goddess endorses the first route, which recognizes that “what-is” is, and that it must be (it is not to not be), on the grounds that it is completely trustworthy and persuasive
On the other hand, the goddess warns the youth away from the route which posits “what-is-not and necessarily cannot be,” as it is a path that can neither be known nor spoken of.
A third possible “route of inquiry” holds being and not-being (or becoming and not-becoming) to be both the same and not the same.
Meaning of close relationship between thinking (or knowing) and being (what exists, or can exist, or necessarily exists)
Does Parmenides really mean to make an identity claim between the two—that thinking really is numerically one and the same as being, and vice-versa?
Or, is it that there is some shared property(-ies) between the two?
Is Parmenides making the rather problematic claim that whatever can be thought, exists?
Or only that whatever does exist can in principle be thought of without contradiction, and thus is understandable by reason—unlike “nothingness”?
Perhaps both?
By studiously avoiding thinking in any way which entails thinking about “what-is-not,” via reductio, the subject of Reality is concluded to be:
truly eternal—ungenerated and imperishable (8.5-21)
a continuous whole (8.21-25)
unmoved and unique (8.21-33)
perfect and uniform (8.42-49)
Parmenides advocated that there is actually just one thing in the entire world (that is, strict monism), and that this entity necessarily possesses the aforementioned properties.
c. Opinion (C 8.51-C 20)
The “opinions of mortals” will be taught in Opinion
This account will be inferior to the account of Aletheia in some way — certainly epistemically and perhaps also ontologically
“hearing the deceptive arrangement of her words” (C 8.50-52)
Includes
metaphysical critiques of how mortals err in “naming” things, particularly in terms of a Light/Night duality (C 8.51-61, 9, 20)
mortals have grounded their views on an oppositional duality of two forms (Light/Fire and Night) when in fact it is not right to do so
it is either wrong for mortals to name both Light and Night
Parmenides is denying the existence of the duality completely
or that naming just one of these opposites is wrong and the other acceptable
Parmenides is accepting that only one of them properly exists
programmatic passages promising a detailed account of the origin of celestial bodies (C 10, 11)
a theogonical account of a goddess who rules the cosmos and creates other deities, beginning with Love (C 12, 13)
cosmogonical and astronomical descriptions of the moon and its relationship to the sun (C 14, 15)
some consideration of the relationship between the mind and body (C 17)
accounts related to animal/human procreation (C 18-19)
d. Positive Aletheia. Negative Opinion?
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Interpretative Treatments
Reception of the Proem
The A-D Paradox: Select Interpretative Strategies and their Difficulties
Strict Monism and Worthless Opinion
Two-World (or Aspectual) Views
Essentialist (or Meta-Principle) Views
Modal Views
Parmenides’ Place in the Historical Narrative
Influential Predecessors?
Anaximander/Milesians
Aminias/Pythagoreanism
Xenophanes
Heraclitus
Parmenides’ Influence on Select Successors
Eleatics: Zeno and Melissus of Samos
The Pluralists and the Atomists
Plato