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Updated: June 2, 2025
Some thinkers have proclaimed change to be the deepest manifestation of reality, while others have insisted upon something abiding behind a world of flux. The question whether change or permanence is more essential arose early in Greek philosophy. Heraclitus was the first one to see in change a deeper significance than in the permanence of the Eleatics.
They taught the art of disputation, and sought systematic methods of proof. They thus prepared the way for a more perfect philosophy than that taught by the Ionians, the Pythagoreans, or the Eleatics, since they showed the vagueness of such inquiries, conjectural rather than scientific. They had no doctrines in common.
This city had, like Miletus, reached a high pitch of commercial prosperity, and like it also became a centre of philosophic teaching. For there Xenophanes remained and founded a school, so that he and his successors received the name of Eleatics. His date is uncertain; but he seems to have been contemporary with Anaximander and Pythagoras, and to have had some knowledge of the doctrine of both.
She is abandoned, and preparation made for crowning Faith in her stead. The inquiries of the Ionians, the reasoning of the Eleatics, the labours of Plato, of Aristotle, have sunk into mysticism and the art of the conjurer.
God and the world are mere names, like the Being of the Eleatics, unless some human qualities are added on to them. Yet the negation has a kind of unknown meaning to us. The priority of God and of the world, which he is imagined to have created, to all other existences, gives a solemn awe to them.
Like the Eleatics he denies that the senses are an absolute test of truth. "For straitened are the powers that have been shed upon our frames, and many the frets that cross us and defeat our care, and short the span of unsatisfying existence wherein 'tis given us to see.
Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race, which has its basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract unity asserted by the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the modern Unitarians, but the living unity consisting in the threefold relation in the Divine Essence, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian revelation, and believed, more or less intelligently, by all Christendom.
When the Eleatics proved the impossibility i.e., the inexpressibility of motion, or when Kant and his followers proved the unreal character of all objects of experience and of all natural knowledge, their task was made easy by the native diversity between the concretions in existence which were the object of their thought and the concretions in discourse which were its measure.
The difficulty with the Eleatics was, as we have seen, how to understand whence or why the transition from that which absolutely is, to this strange, at least apparent, system of eternal flux and transformation.
Hence such images, being merely of the superficial form, are necessarily imperfect and untrue, and so, therefore, must be the knowledge yielded by them. Democritus rejected the one element of the Eleatics, affirming that there must be many; but he did not receive the four of Empedocles, nor his principles of Love and Hate, nor the homoeomeriæ of Anaxagoras.
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