A History of Philosophy in EpitomeSchwegler, Albert
Philosophy
A History of Philosophy in Epitome
Schwegler, Albert
Philosophy -- History
It is scarcely necessary to remark that between the two parts of the
Parmenidean philosophy—between the doctrine concerning being and the
doctrine concerning appearance—there can exist no inner scientific
connection. What Parmenides absolutely denies in the first part, and
indeed declares to be unutterable, viz., the not-being, the many and the
changeable, he yet in the second part admits to have an existence at
least in the representation of men. But it is clear that the not-being
cannot once exist in the representation, if it does not exist generally
and every where, and that the attempt to explain a not-being of the
representation, is in complete contradiction with his exclusive
recognition of being. This contradiction, this unmediated juxtaposition
of being and not-being, of the one and the many, _Zeno_, a scholar of
Parmenides, sought to remove, by affirming that from the very conception
of being, the sensuous representation, and thus the world of the
not-being, are dialectically annihilated.
4. ZENO.—The Eleatic Zeno was born about 500 B. C.; was a scholar of
Parmenides, and the earliest prose writer among the Grecian
philosophers. He is said to have written in the form of dialogues. He
perfected, dialectically, the doctrine of his master, and carried out to
the completest extent the abstraction of the Eleatic One, in opposition
to the manifoldness and determinateness of the finite. He justified the
doctrine of a single, simple, and unchangeable being, in a polemical
way, by showing up the contradictions into which the ordinary
representations of the phenomenal world become involved. While
Parmenides affirms that there is only the One, Zeno shows in his
well-known proofs (which unfortunately we cannot here more widely
unfold), that the many, the changing, that which has relation to space,
or that which has relation to time, is not. While Parmenides affirmed
the being, Zeno denied the appearance. On account of these proofs, in
which Zeno takes up the conceptions of extension, manifoldness and
movement, and shows their inner contradictory nature, Aristotle names
him the founder of dialectics.
While the philosophizing of Zeno is the completion of the Eleatic
principle, so is it at the same time the beginning of its dissolution.
Zeno had embraced the opposition of being and existence, of the one and
the many, so abstractly, and had carried it so far, that with him the
inner contradiction of the Eleatic principle comes forth still more
boldly than with Parmenides; for the more logical he is in the denial of
the phenomenal world, so much the more striking must be the
contradiction, of turning, on the one side, his whole philosophical
activity to the refutation of the sensuous representation, while, on the
other side, he sets over against it a doctrine which destroys the very
possibility of a false representation.
SECTION VII.
HERACLITUS.
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