Co-organizers: Alex Long (agl10@st-andrews.ac.uk) and Barbara Sattler (bs21@st-andrews.ac.uk)
This event has been cancelled.
The organisers hope to reschedule it later in the year.
The conference will be the inaugural event of a Northern Presocratic Network run jointly by Edinburgh and St Andrews.
Speakers and papers
- Gábor Betegh (Cambridge): “The origins of the concept of body: Parmenides, Melissus and Democritus”
- Mathilde Brémond (Clermont Auvergne): “Antilogic arguments by the Eleatics”
- Jenny Bryan (Manchester): “The epistemological reception of Parmenides in Empedocles”
- Lea Cantor (Oxford): “Parmenides and the Centred View”
- Ben Harriman (Edinburgh): “Posidonius on Parmenides on Perception”
- Alex Long (St Andrews): “Truth and belief in Parmenides”
- Richard McKirahan (Pomona): "An Aristotelianizing Parmenides"
- Arnaud Macé (Franche-Comté): "Cosmology and cosmogony in Parmenides' poem"
- Jaap Mansfeld (Utrecht): “Two worlds and their intermediates in Parmenides”
- Emese Mogyoródi (Szeged): “Materialism and Immaterialism, Compatibility and Incompatibility in Parmenides”
- Massimo Pulpito (Taranto): “The anti-Parmenideanism of Melissus”.
- Barbara Sattler (St Andrews/Bochum): “Zeno’s method and its Parmenidean origin”
- David Sedley (Cambridge): “Parmenides and names”
- Simon Trépanier (Edinburgh): “Parmenides’ challenge: rejecting or bracketing off of sense-perception?”
The last 20 years have seen the development of a host of innovative and philosophically sophisticated approaches to the Eleatics and their influence. There have been new major works on the long neglected work by Melissus, new reconstructions of Zeno’s paradoxes, and challenges to the view that Parmenides and the two other Eleatics formed a single 'school'. Recent work has also shown how Melissus and Parmenides developed the inquiries of earlier philosophers, such as the materialistic Ionian philosophers, and how their role in the development of post-Eleatic philosophy was, in important respects, constructive. This conference will bring together leading specialists in early philosophy as well as junior scholars in the field. It aims to build on the new interpretations of this early and pivotal period of philosophy and to see whether we can develop a new coherent picture of each of the three Eleatics. A further aim is to measure and evaluate the influence of contemporary philosophical and scientific thought (in its endorsement of atomism and objection to all forms of monism) in the new interpretative trends outlined above.
The conference is co-funded by the Mind Association, the Scots Philosophical Association, and the Schools of Classics and Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews.
"Lunar eclipse of 2003 November 9" by Oliver Stein, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 / cropped from original.
