School
Eleatics
Overview
The Eleatics were a group of pre-Socratic philosophers and school of thought in the 5th century BC centered around the ancient Greek colony of Elea (Ancient Greek: Ἐλέα), located around 80 miles south-east of Naples in southern Italy, then known as Magna Graecia.
The primary philosophers who are associated with the Eleatic doctrines are Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, and Melissus of Samos, although other Italian philosophers such as Xenophanes of Colophon and Empedocles have also sometimes been classified as members of this movement. The Eleatics have traditionally been seen as advocating a strict metaphysical view of monism in response to the materialist monism advocated by their predecessors, the Ionian school.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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At the same time, the minds of men parted into the two great divisions of those who saw only a principle of motion, and of those who saw only a principle of rest, in nature and in themselves; there were born Heracliteans or Eleatics, as there have been in later ages born Aristotelians or Platonists.
Plato, Timaeus
The author is tied to Eleatics in the knowledge graph; names Eleatics.
It is to this confusion between motion and the space traversed that the paradoxes of the Eleatics are due; for the interval which separates two points is infinitely divisible, and if motion consisted of parts like those of the interval itself, the interval would never be crossed. But the truth is that each of Achilles' steps is a simple indivisible act, and that, after a given number of these acts, Achilles will…
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
States what Eleatics is; names Eleatics twice.
Heraclitus declares the Absolute to be this very process, which, according to the Eleatics, was still subjective; he arrived at objective consciousness, since in it the Absolute is that which moves or changes. Empedocles, Leucippus, and Democritus, on the contrary, rather go to the opposite extreme, to the simple, material, stationary principle, to the substratum which underlies the process; and thus this last, as…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Names Eleatics several times; opens on Eleatics.
Philosophers who discussed Eleatics
- Zeno of Elea
- Victor Cousin
- Leucippus
- Xenophanes
- Plato
- Diogenes
- Parmenides
- Aristocles of Messene
- Melissus of Samos
- Simplicius of Cilicia
- Democritus
- Euclid of Megara
- Empedocles
- Gorgias
- Joseph Dietzgen
- Stefan Pawlicki
Related ideas
- Heraclitus
- Zeno of Elea
- Italy
- Anaxagoras
- Leucippus
- Predicate (grammar)
- Metaphysics
- Monism
- Materialism
- Infinity
- Motion
- School of thought
- Eternity
- Diogenes of Apollonia
- Xenophanes
- Reductio ad absurdum
- Velia
- Plato
- Benjamin Jowett
- Pythagoras
- Sense
- Parmenides
- Paradox
- Ionian school (philosophy)
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of philosophy.
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