#parmenide

[ma-pi-ma]

L’essere è, e non può non essere; il non essere non è, e non può essere.

Parmenide

[valentina-lauricella]

Gloria al Padre...

"Il nulla non esiste", "il nulla non può esistere in alcun modo": è questa intuizione il fondamento del pensiero di Parmenide. Perciò l'unico discorso vero è quello che dice che "qualcosa è", e di conseguenza che "il tutto di questi qualcosa è". Se Cartesio avesse affermato "penso, perciò quello che chiamo il mio sé è" sarebbe arrivato alla medesima conclusione: "tutto ciò che appare è".

Il mutamento appare, anzi appare incessantemente. Ma non vuol dire che tutto ciò che è si stia svolgendo, perché, per esserci uno svolgimento, il presente avrebbe dovuto essere nulla, prima di apparirci presente. E dovrebbe finire nel nulla, per far posto all'apparire di un altro presente. Il mutamento, quindi, è incessante, ma nel suo complesso, nella sua immensa totalità, è immutabile. Il tempo appare, ma la totalità del tempo è eterna, esistendo tutta per intero. E nessun presente sì è mai svolto una prima volta. Infatti questa totalità dell'apparire è il sé del dio del cosmo, il sé dell'uno e del continuo, che non si è mai svolto né è mai divenuto, ma che torna incessantemente presente, cioè eternamente ad apparirsi, non solo perché è, ma anche perché senza alcuna discontinuità è. L'eterno riapparirsi di tutti gli apparire perciò non ne è lo svolgimento, ma ne è ciò che un tempo chiamavamo "la gloria".

(Omaggio a Emanuele Severino - di Gulcan Oruc)

[t-annhauser]

Parmenide e Zenone

Il terribile Parmenide che dal suo promontorio di Capo Palinuro osservò il vasto mare colore del vino ed ebbe l'illuminazione: l'essere è, il non-essere non è. Se il nulla non è, cioè non esiste per sua stessa definizione, tutto è costretto dalla legge del logos a permanere in eterno, immutabile, incorruttibile, e il divenire del mondo è soltanto un'opinione senza fondamento. L'essere è per Parmenide quella sfera ben rotonda in cui ogni ente è da sempre salvo e conservato stabilmente presso totalità delle cose che sono e non possono smettere di essere. È la ragione che indica la verità, non i sensi, che invece ci garantiscono un sapere solo soggettivo.

A difendere e diffondere le controverse tesi del maestro intervenne l'allievo Zenone (Zenone di Elea, da non confondersi con Zenone di Cizio, fondatore dello stoicismo) il quale divenne celebre per i suoi paradossi. Un primo paradosso è quello del bastone che ipoteticamente si può spezzare a metà all'infinito, sicché alla fine si riduce a un niente, questo per dimostrare l'illusorietà della consistenza della materia. Un altro paradosso è quello della freccia che viene scoccata e nel suo tragitto deve attraversare una serie infinita di fotogrammi e di stati immobili, fino a non raggiungere mai il suo bersaglio, sicché se ne deduce che il movimento è illusorio pure lui, e di conseguenza anche ogni cambiamento apparente degli stati del mondo.

Questi argomenti, detti della scuola eleatica, diedero del filo da torcere ai pensatori successivi che ce la misero tutta a dimostrare che invece la vera evidenza è il divenire, che è poi il leitmotiv di tutta la filosofia occidentale: la certezza del mutamento come creazione e distruzione dell'ente, che la scuola eleatica aveva deciso invece di negare così radicalmente per via razionale.

[dj-bouto]

[ilterzouomo]

https://fb.watch/pWpZRRgUDk/

[mayolfederico]

Eugeni d'Ors ~ La valle di Josafat - 2. Figure dell'antichità classica

Eugeni d’Ors ~ La valle di Josafat – 2. Figure dell’antichità classica

  Alessandro Magno il Macedone   La coppa di sangue di bue che, volontariamente bevuta, mise termine alla feconda esistenza di Temistocle era la stessa che piena di cicuta, doveva bere Socrate più tardi. Alcuni mercanti la riportarono di nuovo ad Atene con il cadavere dell’eroe. (Lasciatemi inventare questa leggenda e credere in essa, come un greco, immediatamente dopo di averla…

[philosophybits]

I will tell you which are the only routes of inquiry for thinking: the one, that which is and which it is not possible for it not to be, is the path of persuasion (for it attends upon truth), the other, that which is not and which it is right that it not be, this indeed I declare to you to be a path entirely unable to be investigated: for neither can you know what is not, nor can you say it.

Parmenides, Fragments, B2

[the-framed-maelstrom]

We moderns, or, to speak more broadly, all post-Greek humanity, have for a long time been so deflected that we understand looking exclusively as man’s representational self-direction toward beings. But in this way looking does not at all come into sight; instead it is understood only as a self-accomplished “activity,” i.e., an act of re-presenting. To re-present means here to present before oneself, to bring before oneself and to master, to attack things. The Greeks experience looking at first and properly as the way man emerges and comes into presence, with other beings, but as man in his essence. Thinking as moderns and therefore insufficiently, but for us surely more understandably, we can say in short: the look, θέα, is not looking as activity and act of the “subject” but is sight as the emerging of the “object” and its coming to our encounter. Looking is self-showing and indeed that self-showing in which the essence of the encounter-ing person has gathered itself and in which the encountering person “emerges” in the double sense that his essence is collected in the look, as the sum of his existence, and that this collectedness and simple totality of his essence opens itself to the look—opens itself at any rate in order to let come into presence in the unconcealed at the same time the concealment and the abyss of his essence.

Martin Heidegger, Parmenides

[gingermintpepper]

What’s the significance of each color in Ancient Greece? So green is the only neutral color and it represents mostly natural and earthy things, thank you for telling me that part !! Anyway, as for my Hyacinthus design’s hair being brown, it’s due to the combination of it being a fairly common interpretation of his appearance and also because I find I like how it looks with his skin tone and the purple of his eyes.

Okay, firstly; thank you so much for answering my question too!

Admittedly you can't beat out good, old fashioned colour theory so that's completely fair haha! I still think it's very interesting that brown became the common interpretation of his features so I'm always glad to hear other people's view on it <3

With respect to what colours meant or symbolised in Ancient Greece, it's a super fascinating topic because the Ancient Greeks had a very different perception of colour than how a lot of people - and in this case I'll generalise and say english-speaking people - perceive colour. In a lot of languages, especially older ones, colour wasn't just a way to describe the physical perceptional reality of an observable object (that is, the light reflecting off the object that gives it its perceived hue - the way we perceive colour now) but colour was also used to describe the way in which the people experienced the world. A really good way to think about it is now, if you wanted to distinguish between two types of blue, you would instinctively make a distinction between their shades ("This blue is darker/lighter!") whereas these older people would distinguish based on things in their present, shared world that best matched what they were being asked to describe ("This blue is like the sky/the sea!")

That's an important concept to keep in mind because ancient greek was very unique in that, in addition to this concept of colour being completely intertwined with physical objects (and therefore also acquiring the properties of these objects in the minds of the people), the ancient greeks also did not particularly care about distinguishing between different colour hues (that is, differences in specific individual colour) but rather they were entirely focused on a colour's value - that is, whether it was considered light or dark.

Taking all of this into consideration, the question 'what is the significance of the different colours in Ancient Greece' is a bit of a tricky one to answer because unlike say, Ancient Egyptian which has very clear colours (red, white, green), very clear physical objects that give those colours their property (the desert sand, the sun, people's skin) and very clear symbolic meanings that arose from the natures ascribed to those physical objects due to their influence on the people's lives (hostility, power, new life), Ancient Greece's colours and the perception of those colours was much more abstract and poetic, contingent on their understandings and perceptions of things like light and dark, the sense of touch or taste (sweet and bitter/wet and dry) and what quality was ascribed to the object whose colour is being perceived. Colour was a matter of cosmology, of philosophy and there were many different schools of thought on it from Empedocles' physicalist theories to Anaxagoras' realist theories.

All of this is to say, take the meanings I outlined in this handy-dandy table with a tablespoon of salt! These are based on my understanding of the language used to describe things in classical writings that have survived and my own bias towards Empedocles' physicalist theory of colour and the nature of colour which I also think is very useful for people into greek mythology as a whole due to it making clear links between various gods creating things from mixtures of the four basic elements of nature and the colours that are the result of these mixtures.

I hope this helps even a little and I very much encourage you to do some research into different Greek schools of thought when it comes to colour and the perception of colour as well as how colour affects/reflects the innate nature of all things!

(Also, slight extra note, I left out Kokkinos (scarlet/blood-red) from the table because I didn't really think it was relevant for this outline despite it definitely being an ancient colour. It's a bit difficult to find examples of it with the kind of descriptors Empedocles outlines and I don't want to make assumptions based on third hand knowledge on the greek concept of the nature of things. I'd like to believe it was addressed in more detail in Empedocles' original document - only a fragment of the original some two thousand lines have survived after all - it is confirmed that Empedocles spoke on the recipe for blood and flesh, an equal mixture of all four elements as opposed to bones' four parts fire, two parts earth and two parts water (which is why bones shine white, there's more fire than earth or water) - and I don't want to conject or make assumptions.

I also left out Erythros or basic/primary red according to Plato's list of basic colours because that seemed to have specifically been preferred by Egyptian Greeks according to linguistic data. If I opened up that can of worms with respect to the shared Egyptian-Greek colour language including the way the Greeks like many early peoples did not culturally perceive blue until the invention of Egypt's blue dyes then I would be writing forever and you would never get an actual clear answer about Greek colour symbolism separate and apart from Egyptian cultural influence lmfao. )

A few of the documents that helped me consolidate this information include Sassi's 2022 Philosophical Theories of Colour in Ancient Greek Thought and Ierodiakonou's Empedocles on Colour and Colour Vision. There are also a fair few translations and discussions of the fragments of Empedocles' On Nature still floating about - my copy is a somewhat archaic volume of Leonard's 1908 translation but I never went out searching for updated interpretations and translations of the text since its constantly referenced in perceptional philosophy papers LOL

Anyway, yeah, hope this helps! :D

[humanperson105]

Badiou, Infinity, and the Multiple

Badiou begins the second meditation of Being and Event with the central axiom of Parmenides philosophy: 'If the one is not, nothing is.' By contrast, in Badiou's own words, "My entire discourse originates in an axiomatic decision; that of the non­-being of the one." (Being and Event Pg 31) The dialectic of the one and the many and the concomitant question of the existence of the one concerns the problems inherent to the conception of totality and the various incoherencies that result from both the existence and the inexistence of the one.

In Badiou's reading of Plato's Parmenides, the dialectic of the one and the many results in aporia and has no conclusive resolution. For Badiou, Plato's verdict regarding the unthinkability of the many, what Badiou calls the pure multiple, is a result of what he calls the count-as-one, or the necessity of thought to present the pure multiple as one to render it intelligible. Badiou can assert that the one is not and that therefore nothing is, as for Badiou, the nothing or Void is the unthinkable pure multiple.

Therefore, what should be thought here is rather that 'nothing' is the name of the void: Plato's statement should be transcribed in the following manner; if the one is not, what occurs in the place of the 'many' is the pure name of the void, insofar as it alone subsists as being. The 'nihilist' conclusion restores, diagonal to the one/multiple opposition, the point of being of the nothing, the presentable correlate-as name-of this unlimited or inconsistent multiple whose dream is induced by the non-being of the one.(Badiou pg 35)

Badiou can endorse the Platonic theory of participation, that the non-being of the one participates in our sensible experience, but suspend Plato's verdict regarding the unthinkability of the Void. This is due to Badiou's view that the intelligibility of the pure multiple and its identification as non-totalizable infinity have only become possible following the advent of set theory and the notion of the transfinite found in the work of Georg Cantor. The unpresentability of the pure multiple, or Void, allows Badiou to endorse the Lacanian definition of the real as the impasse of formalization and leads Badiou to generalize the unthinkability of the pure multiple in Plato's philosophy to philosophy as a whole. Throughout Being and Event, Badiou seeks out the impasse of the real in thinkers like Spinoza and Aristotle, among many others. In this regard, Badiou's treatment of Hegel is instructive regarding Badiou's conception of real infinity (the transfinite), the real's relation to his overlapping theories of the event and the subject, his view of the purpose of philosophy, and what I refer to as a dialectic of division rather than a dialectic of sublation at the heart of his theory of truth and its relation to his affirmation of the multiple against the one.

In his Logic, Hegel famously distinguishes between "good" and "bad" infinity. "Good" infinity is "good" only in the sense of being a true infinity, which for Hegel entails an infinity that contains its own limitation, in contrast to the "bad" or false infinity, that whose limitation is external. Hegel's distinction between internal and external limitation is a result of Hegel siding with Parmenides and asserting that the one is; if anything falls outside the infinite, then it can neither be infinite nor one.

Hegel's notion of contradiction is not applicable to just any pair of opposites or contraries. Contradiction, for Hegel, is a relation of determinate negation: A and not-A. For example, on and off does not constitute a contradiction, but on and not-on does. Bad infinity, the not-finite, is not a true infinity as it has an external limitation in its negation, the finite, and the same goes for the finite, which has an external limitation in the not-finite or bad infinity (this is crucial for grasping Badiou's conception of the infinite). The bad infinity can become good only by sublating (to suspend and preserve) this contradiction in a whole that contains the contradiction of A and not-A as moments or qualities of the whole. For infinity to interiorize its limit, the finite must become a moment of the infinite.

Hegel identifies this double process as comprising the true infinite because it does not have any intrinsic limitation. There is nothing about it that brings it to an end. There is nothing outside it. Its determination consists in that very process consisting in the finite and the nonfinite reverting into one another and not being either just separated from one another or united with one another. (Richard Dien Winfield - Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures pg 137)

Hegel is not a thinker of synthesis but rather of syllogistic integration. As Mao says, the dialectic is a "one that divides into two". Hegel's one is without foundation or ground, and this causes it to collapse in on itself, split itself into two, and then subsume this split within a new whole that promptly splits again and again ad infinitum. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. The one is self determinative; as it cuts itself, it differentiates and expands without ever finding closure. This is why Hegel (and Marx) can think totality without rejecting change or becoming; just as the finite is a moment rather than the limit of true infinity, becoming is a moment of Being.

In the chapter of Being and Event devoted to showing the impasse of the real in Hegel's philosophy, Badiou attempts to defend what Hegel refers to as "bad" infinity in the guise of the non-totalizable transfinite. The importance of the transfinite for Badiou lies in its making possible the thinking of a quantitative infinity that cannot be sublated into the "good" Hegelian qualitative infinity. The absence of such a non-totalizable quantity is, for Badiou, the impasse and point of failure of Hegel's thought. Quantitative infinity is necessary for Badiou not only for rendering the Void of inconsistent multiplicity intelligible but also for providing an external limitation to Being and the dissolution of the one - the very thing that causes Hegel to dismiss quantitative infinity - that is integral to the true focus of Badiou's thought: the Event and the subject of truth. Throughout Being and Event, Badiou is at pains to establish that the event does not belong to the ontology of the pure multiple. "With the event we have the first concept external to the field of mathematical ontology." (Being and event pg 184) Without this extrinsic limitation to being there could be no event and no expressions of subjectivity in the fidelity to an event.

In Badiou's dialectic of belonging and non-belonging (all and not-all/finite and not-finite), there is no whole or totality that contains the moments of the dialectic, only diachronic cuts in the “one”; a dialectic without sublation/suspension. This is why Badiou adopts a dialectic of the “one into two” alongside his espousal of a meta-ontological role for philosophy in Being and Event onward; prior to this (see Badiou's The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic), Badiou's dialectic was purely one of splitting, division, discontinuity, and differentiation: “the one into one” (the one splits into two separate ones), or, “the one into none” (a split that affects a subtraction of the one). Badiou can adopt this position as he relegates the thinking of being to set theory and, concomitantly, relegates the task of unifying subjective truth events into a universal discourse to philosophy. Following Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Badiou's theory of subjectivity finds its expression in a Fichtean voluntaristic act carried out by a group subject rather than a class in and for itself (for example, see Sartre's discussion of the storming of the bastille). Badiou is not a thinker of history and change understood through periods of transition, but rather of singular ruptures without precedence. The sheer quantitative excess of being leaves open the possibility of the non-ontological event, the subject, and the subtraction of truth from knowledge.

[yorgunherakles]

var olmamızın değeri nedir? hiçbir değeri yoksa, neden varsınız? farkındayım, kendi suçunuzla bu hayatta bulunuyorsunuz. bunun cezasını kendi ölümünüzle çekmeniz gerekecek. bakın, dünyanız nasıl sararıp soluyor. denizler ufalıp kuruyor; ateş, daha şimdiden dünyanızı yok ediyor; bu dünya, sonunda sis ve duman olup ortadan kalkacak. ama böyle bir ölümlülük dünyası bir daha bir daha yeniden kurulacak: oluşun lanetinden sizi bir daha kim kurtarabilir?

nietzsche - yunanlıların trajik çağında felsefe

[existentialcomicsfeed]

Philosophy and Traffic

[tides-of-truth]

Part 1 of 2

+ We have been made to believe that we can and need to buy our way into the eternal-or on the other hand, that if we have been through a spiritual or mystical experience-

that we can't just share it, but need to package it into a format to sell-

+ This you could say, may be one of those tests put on our path-

like on every journey from Alice in Wonderland to the Wizard of Oz—

no path is ever so simple,

but characters and challenges are placed in our way— to test us in some crucial way, for our own good,

so that we may become deserving of the treasure that is ours at the end—

+ Small Essay on Tradition & Initiation at link.

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

it is not insignificant that eros was among the first primordial deities to be born

[dj-bouto]

[lindahall]

Parmenides of Elea – Scientist of the Day

Parmenides of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, flourished around 475 B.C.E.; his birth and death years are unknown. Learn more