ABSTRACT
European philosophy started life as speculative science. The remarkable pantheon of Greek thinkers classed as “Presocratic” on the ground that they are philosophically antecedent to Socrates treated the world itself as their primary explanandum. Although all the thinkers wrote one or more books, none of those books survives intact. Their thought must be reconstructed from fragments and other testimonies. Parmenides’ poem describes his journey in a chariot to the House of Night, at whose gates the paths of Day and Night meet. Melissus presented a revised version of Parmenides’ monism as a revolutionary physics, defending the solitary existence of a single infinite entity which he calls “the One,” and using the kind of premises and arguments that were typical of cosmological writing. Of all the metaphysical ideas generated in the Presocratic era, the brand of bottom-up materialism is not only chronologically the last, but also, appropriately, the one that can most directly engage twenty-first-century metaphysical concerns.
