Parmenides, a Greek philosopher of Elea (Velia), in Lucania, and in the opinion of the ancients the greatest member of the Eleatic School (q.v.), flourished about the middle of the 5th cen- tury B.C. Nothing is known with certainty regarding his life, but Plato tells us he visited Athens in his old age together with his pupil Zeno, and conversed with Socrates, then quite a youth—an anachronism most probably intended to account for the influence which the philosophy of Parmenides undoubtedly exercised on that of Socrates and Plato themselves. Parmenides, like his master Xenophanes of Colophon, sometimes regarded as the first of the Eleatics, expounded his philosophy in verse—his only work being a didactic poem On Nature. The extant remains have been rendered into English hexameters by Thomas Davidson (Journal of Speculative Philosophy, St Louis, 1870), and paraphrased in English prose by W. L. Courtney (Studies in Philosophy, 1882). The leading design of this poem is to demonstrate the reality of Absolute Being, the non-existence of which Parmenides declares to be inconceivable, but the nature of which, on the other hand, he admits to be equally inconceivable, inasmuch as it is dissociated from every limitation under which man thinks. The permanent unity of the universe is thus the ultimate object of knowledge. Parmenides is not a theologist in speculation, seeking rather to identify his Absolute Being with Thought than with Deity.
The best edition of his fragments is in S. Karsten's Philosophorum Græcorum Reliquiae (Amst. 1835). See also the histories of philosophy of Brandis, Erdmann, Schwegler, Ueberweg, and Zeller.