ABSTRACT
Parmenides’ poem argues for a fundamental distinction between belief (that which seems to be) and truth (that which actually is). According to Parmenides, all the ‘things-that-seem’ that the philosophers perceive around us (such as trees, rocks, rivers and cats) are not, in themselves, the true reality. What Parmenides thinks these rationally conceivable things actually are is not entirely clear, but the philosophers can guess that logical proofs and mathematical equations would certainly count. Rocks and trees and rivers and cats probably are not rationally conceivable by us, but the omniscient Goddess should be able to conceive of them. Parmenides himself theorized that the natural world could be explained in terms of just two basic categories: light and night. While earlier philosophers had certainly grasped the basic requirement of simplicity, not until after Parmenides did theories deal in the highly abstract form of logical simplicity that is so characteristic of post-Eleatic Greek science.
