ABSTRACT
According to Aristotle, metaphysics or ‘first philosophy’ is the study of ‘being qua being’. The Aristotelian metaphysician, in other words, attempts to discover, to elucidate and to analyse the properties which must belong to every existent thing as such. And Aristotle's notion of metaphysics, in a somewhat relaxed and sophisticated form, is still the modern notion. The first full-blooded metaphysician was Parmenides; and the first systematic metaphysics was the Eleatic philosophy. We have two accounts, both almost complete, of Eleatic metaphysics. The first is contained in fragment B 8 of Parmenides, the second occupies the several fragments of Melissus; the two accounts differ in important detail, but their overall structure and their general intellectual nisus are one and the same; and it is, I think, helpful as well as convenient to consider them side by side.
