Why Do Pre-Socratics Do Not Exist

Sixth- to fifth-century B.C.E. philosophers spent their lives trying to make the world more comprehensible. Most of the pre-Socratics were naturalists, so they explained the world they saw in terms of natural things. These early philosophers believed that the universe was more systematic and rational, that the world functioned apart from the gods or divine authority, and that it was more scientific and fact-based. Naturalism centered on empirical facts, and scientific principles and laws, however, not all of the pre-Socratics agreed on how the world should be understood. Parmenides, also called the Father of Western Philosophy, rejected change in the universe, an opinion that other pre-Socratics disagreed with. To address these opposing ideas, …show more content…
The way of truth allowed for thought and talk about what-is, but not what-is-not. However, to assert that nothingness does not exist and is not true, Parmenides had to argue the following: There is no generation or destruction, everything that exists always has and always would exist, there is no change, no movement, and no plurality—there is only the one (Parmenides B8). The criteria Parmenides puts forth seem to support the non-existence of nothingness, however, he gives rise to dissent from other philosophers when he rejects the notion of change. No one had every argued like Parmenides before which was why he was believed to be so great, but many other philosophers, for example Heraclitus (Heraclitus B12) and a number of atomists, disagreed with him protesting that change was, in fact, essential to the way of the …show more content…
One the one hand, the concept of atoms satisfy Parmenidean requirements for reality in that their inner cores are unchanging (the atoms do, however, change position, but this does not effect their atomic being). On the other hand, there is a second player in the atomic system called the void. Void is where the atoms are not, and atoms are able to move throughout this empty space. Atomists explicitly call the void “the nothing” or the “what is not,” whereas atoms are called “the something” or the “what is.” Hence they explicitly challenge Parmenides’ proscription against what-is-not; yet there is good evidence that they insisted that the void is real in its own right, and not simply the negation of what-is. Void separates atoms, which allows them to move and come close to one another without melding into each other. The mixing together and separating of the different types of atoms into different arrangements is responsible for all the aspects of the sensible world, and so what looks like coming-to-be and passing-away is merely rearrangement of the basic entities—atoms and