ABSTRACT
Thus we are first given the certain truth, the only truth, and the whole truth. (Like Wittgenstein at the end of the preface to the Tractatus, Parmenides might have written: 'the truth of the thoughts here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive'.) This truth is based on the thesis 'it [the knowable, the object of knowledge, the real world} is, or exists', so that it cannot not exist. 7 Parmenides (or the goddess) asserts that, beyond speaking of,8 and knowing,9 what exists, no speech or knowledge (that is, thought) is possible: 'What can be said, and what can be known, must be what is (what is the case, what exists, what is real).' 10 Indeed, he might well have quoted Wittgenstein: 'Whereof one cannot speak [and thus whereof one cannot think} thereof one must be silent.' 1 Yet like Wittgenstein, he found himself speaking about the unspeakable.
