Inquiring into Being : Essays on Parmenides

New essays on early Greek natural philosopher Parmenides, who is perhaps the originator of metaphysics. Inquiring into Being is a study of Parmenides, the early Greek pre-Socratic philosopher often credited as the first metaphysician and whose sole written work was a philosophical poem. In his poem, Parmenides has a narrating goddess character indicate the sense of being that must be and cannot be as a corrective to the errors mortals make when accounting for the ultimate nature of reality while showing a keen scientific understanding of natural phenomena. Inquiring into Being brings together and further develops recent work on Parmenides and the surviving fragments of his text through twelve chapters by scholars from the United States and United Kingdom working in analytic and continental philosophy, classics, political theory, literary theory, and the history of science. It serves as a guide through many of the interpretive controversies in Parmenides's poem while offering new insights into Parmenides's role as poet, scientist, natural philosopher, and investigator into the nature of being.