Two Neo-Analytic Approaches to Parmenides’ Metaphysical-Cosmological Poem

Abstract

These two important books, which have appeared five years apart within our immediately recent past, are connected – not merely by the fact of having been produced by the same publisher, rather – by a conceptually rich and intri guing matrix both of antithetical differences and of shared assumptions. And for reasons that will become clear presently, discussion of them can proceed best in the order reverse to that of their publication. (In furnishing page references, which will be mostly done within parentheses, I shall prefix the two authors’ initials – respectively, JP and MW.) Wedin’s book deals almost exclusively with just the central part of Parmenides’ didactic poem, from B2 to B8.49. For this sequence of texts, Wedin prefers, as the book’s subtitle indicates, the name “Way of Truth” (cf. MW, p. 1). But since Parmenides ostensibly uses alētheia, “truth”, in reference to the contents of this central part,1 I shall myself be using that simpler name, “Truth”, as title for the part at issue. The argumentation in “Truth” is laid out by Wedin in strict “regimentation” (a term that recurs frequently in the book),2 i. e., with deployment of the conceptual resources and notational devices of modern formal