Edited with New Translation by Richard McKirahan With a New Preface by Malcolm Schofield This book is a revised and expanded version of A.H. Coxon's full critical edition of the extant remains of Parmenides of Elea—the fifth-century B.C. philosopher by many considered "one of the greatest and most astonishing thinkers of all times." Coxon's presentation of the complete ancient evidence for Parmenides and his comprehensive examination of the fragments, unsurpassed to this day, have proven invaluable to our understanding of the (...) Eleatic since the book's first publication in 1986. This edition, edited by Richard McKirahan and with a new preface by Malcolm Schofield, is released on the 100th anniversary of Coxon's birth. This new edition for the first time includes English translations of the testimonia and of any Ancient Greek throughout the book, as well as an English/Greek glossary by Richard McKirahan, and revisions by the late author himself. The text consists of Coxon's collations of the relevant folios of manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, Proclus and Simplicius and includes all extant fragments, a commentary, the testimonia, a complete list of sources, linguistic parallels from both earlier and later authors, and the fullest critical apparatus that has appeared since Diels’ _Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta _. The collection of testimonia includes the philosophical discussions of Parmenides by Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, most of which had been omitted by Diels. The introduction discusses the history of the text, the language and form of the poem, Parmenides’ use and understanding of the verb ‘to be’, his place in the history of earlier and later philosophy and the biographical tradition. In the commentary Coxon deals in detail with both the language and the subject matter of the poem and pays full attention to Parmenides’ account of the physical world. The appendix relates later Eleatic arguments to those of Parmenides. (shrink)

In the Classical Quarterly for April, 1933, Professor Cornford maintains that the ‘Two Ways’ of Parmenides are not meant as alternatives: ‘The Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming are no more parallel and alternative systems of cosmology, each complete in itself, than are Plato's accounts of the intellectual and sensible worlds.’ I wish here to try to support his general view, which seems to me to be indisputably correct, while differing from Professor Cornford in some important details.

I FORMS IN THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHYSICISTS Plato's dialogue Parmenides carried in the classification of Thrasyllus the editorial subtitle nepi i6«ov, ...

In writing the following notes on some passages in Aeschylus' Persae I have consulted mainly the editions of Schiitz, Blomfield, Hermann, Paley, Vitelli–Wecklein, Sidgwick, Prickard, Wilamowitz, Mazon, and Italie , and the Index of Italie. The text quoted is that of Murray.

The following discussion' of the manuscript tradition of Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's Physics i-iv originated in an examination of the tradition of the fragments of Parmenides. It is therefore illustrated not only from Simplicius but particularly from the texts of Parmenides quoted by him. This will not be misleading, since, though many of these texts are quoted by Simplicius more than once, there is little or no sign in any manuscript of interpolation from one passage to another and it is (...) not likely that any scribe could have interpolated the text from an independent manuscript of Parmenides. (shrink)

In all texts of the fragments of Parmenides printed in the last fifty years he begins his poem by speaking of ‘the way which’ ‘carries through all towns the man who knows’ . The more percipient critics have realized that is difficult or impossible to defend, for it makes no good sense and is incompatible with 1. 27, according to which the way is . In fact , which is alleged to be the reading of the best manuscript of Sextus' (...) books Adversus Dogmaticos, has no manuscript authority at all. (shrink)