The Eleatic School

The Eleatic school took its name from Elea, the Greek colony in southern Italy where Parmenides taught. Against the flux-philosophies of Ionia, the Eleatics held that true reality is one, eternal, indivisible, and unchanging — grasped by reason, not by the deceiving senses.

Parmenides' poem On Nature argued that 'what is, is', so that change and plurality are illusions; his pupil Zeno of Elea defended this with his famous paradoxes of motion; and Melissus of Samos extended the doctrine. By forcing the question of how the changing many can arise from the changeless one, the Eleatics set the central problem that Plato and Aristotle would inherit.