Parmenides (510 BC - 450 BC)

Lifespan: 510 BC - 450 BC
Primary Base of Operations: Greek city of Elea
Schools of Thought: Eleatic
Other Occupations: Poet
Teacher: Xenophanes (probably), and Ameinias

- believed every-day perception ofreality of the physical world is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is 'One Being': an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole. Under 'way of seeming', Parmenides set out a contrasting but more conventional view of the world, thereby becoming an early exponent of the duality of appearance and reality. For him and his pupils the phenomena of movement and change are simply appearances of a static, eternal reality.

- truth cannot be known through sensory perception. Only pure reason(Logos) will result in the understanding of the truth of the world.
- argued against "nothingness"- denying the possibility of the void.
- thought nothing can have real existence but what is conceivable; therefore to be imagined and to be able to exist are the same thing, and there is no development. The essence of what is conceivable is incapable of development, imperishable, immutable, unbounded, and indivisible. What is various and mutable, all development, is a delusive phantom. Perception is thought directed to the pure essence of being; the phenomenal world is a delusion, and the opinions formed concerning it can only be improbable.