Commentary

This opening of the poem's central argument sets out the two routes of inquiry that Parmenides regards as open to the mind, and it is the basis of the distinction between the way of truth and the way of opinion. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield's commentary treats the passage as the foundation of the Eleatic method, in which reasoning about being is separated from the observation of change. Alexander Mourelatos, in The Route of Parmenides, argues that the phrase the way that it is names a path of reasoning rather than a doctrine, and that the poem asks the listener to follow the argument step by step. Jonathan Barnes has noted that the fragment's sharp disjunction between what is and what is not has been read both as a logical principle and as an ontological claim, and that interpreters disagree about how far the two can be separated. Patricia Curd's study of the Eleatic legacy places this passage at the origin of the later tradition of dialectic, which Plato and Aristotle inherited. The translation given here is approximate, and the ellipsis marks a cut in the surviving text that the reader should note. The Greek should be consulted before quotation.