Abstract

In this text I interpret non-predicatively Parmenides’ argument in the “Alêtheia”
section of his Peri Physeôs. I call ‘non-predicative’ a reading that explores the absence of subject and predicate in “is/is not” (B2.3, 5) so that the verbal forms used in these “ways of research” (B2.2) are not read as copulas, but as self-referential expressions. From the impossibility of knowing “what is not” (B2.6-8a) results the “decision to abandon” that ‘noname’ (anônymon: B8.17-18a) as a way o research, leaving ‘is’ (B8.2) as the only [name] (B8.1b-2a) that “can be thought of” (B8.1b). With this interpretation ‘being’ is not read as the object of ‘thinking’, nor ‘thinking’/’thought’ as the faculty which captures ‘being’ (B3, B8.34), but as the infallible cognitive state in which “thought, thinking and what is thought are” (B6.1a). The non-predicative reading of Parmenides left traces in texts by Plato, Gorgias and Protagoras, some of them announcing the capture of non-predicative expressions by predication in Plato’s dialogues

Keywords: Eleatic argumentation, predicative/non-predicativ contexts, Plato, Gorgias
Protagoras.