Influences

If Parmenides is to be believed, the only influence on his thinking was the Goddess - and she is given no specific name. However, his search for truth must be seen as part of the Ionian school of philosophers who sought to explain the physical nature of the universe.

His legacy is long lasting in that he launched one of the all-time great questions which has continued to be debated through the centuries - the nature of being. It is to Parmenides that we can trace the origins of that most abstract and esoteric branch of philosophy - metaphysics, which seeks to explain the features of ultimate reality. His theory of the unity of being was opposed even in his own day by Heracleitus and the debate continues to this day. Is the universe finite or infinite, ordered or chaotic, perfect or imperfect, one or many, knowable or unknowable??? There are phycisists today who continue to seek a single "theory of everything" that will explain the nature of the universe.

As much as his insight into the nature of being, his method of inquiry had a profound influence on later philosophy. Parmenides and his disciple, Zeno of Elea (as opposed to the Zeno the Stoic), often choose to prove a thesis by disproving the contradictory proposition. While the principle of contradiction - that contradictory propositions can not at one and the same time be true - may seem self evident, this is its first overt use in formal argument. It is difficult to imagine a Platonic dialogue without this emphasis and it certainly plays an important role in formal logic. Indeed, Plato later dedicated a Dialogue to him.