Eleatic School

Eleatic School is an Ancient Greek Philosophical School, which arose in Elea in the south of Italy in the 6-7 BC. E. Its main representatives were Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Samos, Gorgias.

In contrast to the Miletus and Pythagorean traditions that viewed reality as reconciliation, the unity of opposites, the Eleatics reasonably criticized all doctrines, which recognize the changing first principle of things. The Eleatics justify the notion of the invariable nature of true being, the shame of all the noticeable changes and the relations between things because otherwise, any doctrine of a particular thing becomes a mere illusion, no knowledge is support in theory or in practical life.

The Eleus school for the first time distinguished between thinking (and conceivable being) and sensory data (and being perceived sensually), highlighted being as a concept of reality. Due to this, for the first time, the division between the concept and its designation was realized, the concept becomes a separate subject of the study. The Eleatics were able to formulate the concept of unity, a single being as a continuous, unchangeable, indivisible whole, equally present in all elements of the sensual reality.

The concept of being was one of the main concepts for the classification of the known reality, for the construction of the first logically based systems of knowledge on the principle of the combination of known representations in statements that do not contradict each other. The first attempts to analyze the concepts used by philosophers have led to the discovery of the phenomenon of limitation, contradictory concepts. Thus, known Zeno's aphorisms have shown that the concept of "one-to-many", "limited is unlimited," and others are unable to reflect reality, which they should reflect in their definitions. Due to this discovery, there was the problem of creating new concepts that are more suitable for the knowledge of the Cosmos. First of all, this is a problem of displaying means of change logic, movement, processes.

The Eleatic school was characterized by a strict monism in the doctrine of being and rationalism in the doctrine of cognition. At the center of the teachings of all three Eleatic philosophers was the doctrine of being. Parmenides made the concept of "being" the subject of analysis in his philosophical poem "On Nature". Zeno, with the help of logical aporias, showed the absurdity of teachings arising from other premises, other than those used by Parmenides.

The main drawback of the Eleatic school was that while being purely metaphysical, it at the same time wished to be a natural philosophy and mixed the concepts of two orders. Nevertheless, the influence of the Eleatics is great; their understanding of the true being was reflected in Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus; they had an influence on the Socratic dialectics, and on the Platonic doctrine of ideas, and on the metaphysics of Aristotle.