After Parmenides : studies on language and metaphysics in early Greek philosophy

This set of previously published essays, several of them now expanded and revised, offers a sustained analysis of conceptual connections between (i) the metaphysics and epistemology of Parmenides and (ii) corresponding themes in the philosophies of other pre-Socratics. The book's central part explores how the early philosophers of Greece became progressively sensitized to the importance of such concepts as "form", "type", "structure", "arrangement". This developed in large measure because such concepts, importing as they do plurality and differentiation, are inherently problematic for Parmenides. The book's central part may thus be read as an account of the "discovery of Form" in early Greek philosophy Cover 1 Author’s Prefatory Note 11 Prefazione (M. Pulpito) 12 Acknowledgments 18 Abbreviations 19 Part I: Preliminaries and Fundamentals 20 1. Presocratic Origins of the Principle that There Are No Origins from Nothing 22 2. “Nothing” as “Not-Being”: Some Literary Contexts That Bear on Plato and also on Parmenides 37 Part II: The Discovery of Form 48 3. Form as Shape, Array, Order: Earliest Approaches and Eleatic Scruples 50 4. Quality, Structure, Emergence: in Anaxagoras, Philolaus, Democritus, and in Empedocles 80 5. The Concept of the Universal in Some Later pre-Platonic Cosmologists 128 6. Democritus on the Distinction Between Universals and Particulars: the Relevance of Fragments B124 and B165 147 7. Intrinsic and Relational Properties of Atoms in the Democritean Ontology 160 Part III: The Sophist’s Demurrer 182 8. Gorgias on the Function of Language 184 Bibliography 214 Indexes 228 Diese Sammlung bereits veröffentlichter Aufsätze – von denen einige erweitert und überarbeitet wurden – bietet eine nachhaltige Analyse der konzeptuellen Verbindungen zwischen der Metaphysik und Erkenntnistheorie des Parmenides und entsprechenden Motiven in den Philosophien anderer Vorsokratiker. Der zentrale Teil des Buches untersucht, wie die frühen Philosophen Griechenlands nach und nach für die Bedeutung von Begriffen wie "Form", "Typ", "Struktur", "Anordnung" sensibilisiert wurden. Diese Entwicklung hat sich vor allem deshalb vollzogen, weil derartige Konzepte, die Pluralität und Differenzierung importieren, für Parmenides von Natur aus problematisch sind. Der zentrale Teil des Buches kann daher als Bericht über die "Entdeckung der Form" in der frühen griechischen Philosophie gelesen werden