57. Parmenides, Cosmos, and Being: A Philosophical Interpretation, by Panagiotis Thanassas. ISBN-13: 978-087462-755-8 & ISBN-10: 0-87462-755-9. ©2008. 109 pages. Paperbound. Bibliography. Index. $15
In the philosophical poem he composed around 500 BC, Parmenides presents an anonymous goddess who – like a philosophical Gorgon – denies movement and plurality and propagates an ontology that completely petrifies the world of phenomena. This is the communis opinion, against which the current interpretation is addressed. Parmenidean Truth does not deny the polymorphy of the Cosmos, but rather endeavors to noetically understand its unity as a result of participation in Being. The second and longer part of the poem, the so-called Doxa, then presents a cosmogonic and cosmological “world-arrangement” of divine origin, founded on the combination of the two forms of Light and Night.
Panagiotis Thanassas was born in 1967 in Patras, Greece. He studied philosophy at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where he received his PhD in 1996. He has taught Philosophy at Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Cyprus, and is currently Assistant Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is author of several books and articles on Greek Philosophy, Hegel, Heidegger, and Hermeneutics.
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