Who Was Parmenides?

Lewis is a home-schooler and has just started an AS-level in Philosophy. He’s also a lazy writer who rarely edits his work; English is his weakest subject. We’re currently concentrating on improving his sentence structuring and punctuation and the following is a piece he has edited and is now happy with:

Parmenides was an ancient Greek philosopher, and dedicated Priest of Apollo. He was born in Elea in the early 5th century B.C.E and was the founder of the Eleatic School of Philosophy. Parmenides descended from a very well-off family but his date of birth is unknown and very controversial, with several theories as to when he was born. Parmenides was the pupil of another Greek Philosopher named Xenophanes and in turn Parmenides had his own pupils, the most famous of whom was Zeno.

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Very little is actually known about Parmenides and his work, as all that has survived is 150 pages of a diary that was originally believed to contain more than 1000 pages. In his diary Parmenides describes his journey from darkness to light while being carried in a working chariot. In the poem Parmenides mentions his theories such as change is impossible and existence is timeless. As you can imagine people would have and still have difficulty in believing and comprehending these theories. Parmenides also had a very important argument, called the ontological argument, where Parmenides is against nothingness and is essentially denying the possibility of a void. This led to disagreement and counter arguments where people proposed the atomic theory which suggestions that everything in the universe is either a void or an atom. With his theories, Parmenides very strongly influenced Plato, one of the world’s most famous philosophers, and through Plato, he influenced most of the Western world of Philosophy.

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