Non-being in Parmenides of Elea

Abstract: In fragment DK 28 B 2 of his poem, Parmenides presents his method for distinguishing true persuasion from the lack of true persuasion. His famous proposal of these two ways of thinking form a complex statement of a system that intends to guarantee the veracity of statements in order to obtain reliable discourse, the only discourse capable of true persuasion. The present paper shows that the central role in Parmenidian argumentation is attributed to non-being, a notion derived from a reflection on the impossibility of the negation of being. Thus the whole fragment is interpreted in terms of this central notion. We show that Parmenides discovered the impossibility of negation, which we now call 'contradiction', and that he articulated the means for avoiding contradiction in thought and discourse, a rule which today we call the principle of non-contradiction. The study presented here is a detailed investigation of the notion of non-being in the DK 28 B 2 fragment, and includes a new translation of it.