Abstract

John Palmer, author of Plato’s Reception of Parmenides (Oxford, 1999), here essays a radically new interpretation of Parmenides and his relation to Presocratic predecessors and successors, challenging received Anglo-American views (Heidegger and his epigones are ignored) on numerous fronts. Palmer sees the prevailing narrative in the first two volumes of Guthrie’s History as modified by Owen, Barnes, and Kirk/Raven/Schofield, and means not to revise but to overturn it (although on his own account, especially of recent scholarship on the early thinkers and their relations, it is not clear that this has not already substantially occurred). Moreover, he means us to abandon entirely the dominant belief that Parmenides ..