Prologue to Parmenides Quotes

“Non-being is "not to be spoken of," for it is, in the strictest sense, nowhere.”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“Grasp firmly with thy mind the near and the far together”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“(...) causes which are indistinguishable intrinsically, when considered by themselves, cannot produce distinguishable effects.”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“It is surely good method to posit our ignorance of a dazzling, familiar and yet ununderstood word, by treating it formally as an unknown term, and trying to define it by context”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“(...) the line of mathematical imagination and that of philological critique seem to have faced each other in mutual incomprehension through the centuries”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“Real problems follow upon each other in a way which makes sense to the intellectual imagination.”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“I have always understood that there is a kind of philosophical language which is only accessible to special philosophers”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“Metaphysics, whatever it may be, seems still to lead men astray much more than any physics.”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“The Pythagoreans had no sex prejudice, contrary to later times, but Parmenides goes much further than they did, further than ever Mr. Robert Graves would dare. His matriarchal absolutism is revealed not only in his Daemon Lady but in all her attendants and epicleses,...”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“So we are led back to the neutral ground on which Parmenides had placed himself, a ground where reason and truth about nature were one and the same.”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides

“Part of the trouble is modern. Since the rescuing of the texts by the great philologists of the Nineteenth Century, one school after another has tried to inject its preconceptions into their meaning, according to the way in which they read the history of philosophical ideas.
Part is ancient. And it begins very early. Plato, Aristotle, Eudemus, Theophrastus, Proclus, Simplicius are clearly at odds about what Parmenides may really have meant.”
― Giorgio de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides