ABSTRACT

The major figures in the middle of the fifth century BC-Zeno, Melissus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus-were roughly contemporary and the leading figure among the Atomists, Democritus, only a little younger. All of them react to Parmenides-although their mutual relations cannot be accounted for in detail. There is no chronological succession in which each individual philosopher reacts against his predecessor; all were confronted with the same set of problems and must be thought of as reflecting a wideranging contemporary debate. Zeno and Melissus stuck to Parmenides’ fundamental position, denying the existence of plurality and hence of the physical world. For the others the task must be to respect Parmenides’ logic but at the same time ‘to save the phenomena’, so that philosophy still could be a reflection about the cosmos; thus doing, they rehabilitated the earlier natural philosophy, but allowed the metaphysical perspective in Parmenides to fade into the background. Empedocles constitutes a direct reaction against Parmenides. Anaxagoras and the Atomists, furthermore, took into account such theoretical-mathematical problems as divisibility and continuity versus discontinuity. So doing they-directly or indirectly-provided ‘answers’ to Zeno’s paradoxes, and it seems natural to imagine a distinction between the thinkers who came before and after the discovery of incommensurables.