ABSTRACT
Alfred North Whitehead described the European philosophical tradition as 'a series of footnotes to Plato'. Whether or not this is fair to the thinkers who followed Plato, it is a gross injustice to the philosophers who preceded him. Pre-eminent among these giants was Parmenides. Elizabeth Anscombe's slightly tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Plato might be characterized as 'Parmenides' footnote' is not as perverse as it seems. Parmenides' relative obscurity is in part due to his being hidden behind his consequences. An attraction of Parmenides is that one can read Plato's complete surviving works in fifteen or twenty minutes. The empiricists buy into the scientific world picture and it is difficult to escape the impression that they feel that matter is the ultimate reality. Materialism is overwhelmingly the orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy. Philosophers over the centuries have been attracted to the notion of a featureless, stable substance underlying everything.
