Abstract

For a long time, Parmenides has been considered the first real metaphysician in history, a theorist of a disembodied being, unreachable by the scientific knowledge of the world. In his Eleatic Lectures, Giovanni Cerri goes back to his renown interpretation of Parmenides as a scientist fully aware of the epistemological foundations of knowledge, and capable of foreshadowing the ultimate outcome of the evolution of science, that is, the discovery of being as a single homogeneous body. Cerri also shows that the works of two other thinkers who were trained in the heart of the school of Elea itself support his interpretation: on the one hand Zeno, with his arguments against plurality; on the other hand Leucippus, the inventor of atomism. Ten scholars have been called to discuss this broad interpretation of a crucial page in the history of thought. Cerri replies to each of them in the final pages of the volume, engaging in a dense dialogue.