In this paper, I want to show that continuity is of crucial philosophical significance in Parmenides, who is the first thinker in the West to use the notion of continuity in a philosophically interesting and systematic way, and what being continuous (suneches) means for him. I look in some detail at the three passages in fragment 8 of Parmenides’ poem that are central for Parmenides’ notion of being suneches and discuss whether being suneches refers to something being temporally uninterrupted, spatially (...) connected, or ontologically holding together. An analysis of these three passages shows that suneches for Parmenides implies complete homogeneity and indivisibility. This analysis is also the basis for showing that suneches is conceptualized very differently in Parmenides’ poem and Aristotle’s Physics because of different starting points and different understandings of what we would call the principle of sufficient reason. (shrink)

Whatever our metaphysics of time, today we usually work with the assumption that we have one unified temporal framework, which allows for situating all events, processes, and happenings in the sense that we can put them all in a temporal relation to each other; they are all either before, after, or simultaneous with each other. In this paper, I show that for the early Greeks, by contrast, the very idea of such a unified notion of time would be foreign; instead, (...) they assume different temporal (and not necessarily comparable) struc-tures belonging to different events. And I show what effect this lack has on the quality of temporal experiences – it means that different temporal experiences are thus seen as expe-riences of genuinely different kinds. (shrink)