Eleatic School of Ancient Greek Philosophy Texts

The Eleatic school was founded by Parmenides in the early fifth century BCE at Elea (modern Velia), a Greek colony in southern Italy, where he also established a medical school. Xenophanes of Colophon is sometimes counted a precursor, but Parmenides is regarded as the school's founder.

The school was defined by a radical monism: true reality is a single, unchanging, undifferentiated plenum of Being, and all differentiation, motion, and change are illusory appearances. The Eleatics rejected sense experience as a source of truth, arguing that the senses report contradictions and cannot grasp what truly is; only thought, guided by logical necessity, can reach the fundamental truth that the All is One. A central principle was that being cannot come from non-being.

Each major figure argued the doctrine in his own way. Parmenides argued directly for a finite, timeless Being, organising his poem around a "way of truth", concerning what is, and a "way of opinion", concerning appearances. Zeno of Elea (c. 490–430 BCE) defended the founder indirectly, devising paradoxes against motion and plurality that reduced the opposing views to absurdity. Melissus of Samos, a later adherent active in the mid-5th century BCE, modified the doctrine by arguing that Being is infinite and eternal in duration.

The school flourished through the fifth century BCE, its later members building ever more exact logical arguments to defend and extend the founder's principles. Later Presocratic philosophers and Aristotle rejected the Eleatic conclusions but took the arguments seriously, and the school's demand for logical rigour raised the standard of philosophical discourse.

Its reach extended well beyond its own century. The Sophist Gorgias applied Eleatic-style argument in his <cite>On Nature or What Is Not</cite>, and Plato engaged deeply with Eleatic ideas in the <cite>Parmenides</cite> and the <cite>Sophist</cite>. Its methods of argument, and its challenge to the testimony of the senses, set the terms for much of the philosophy that followed.