Parmenides and his precursors. A Borgesian reading of Cordero?s Parmenides

SOARES, LUCAS

Parmenides venerable and awesome (Plato, Theaetetus 183e). Proceedings of the International Symposium

Parmenides Publishing

Lugar: Las Vegas/Zurich/Athens; Año: 2011; p. 373 - 382

How to find Parmenides among so many Parmenides? Especially when, as Cordero writes, ?if there is a pre-Socratic author of whom the interpreter must distrust entirely the opinion of ancient commentators, it is Parmenides?. There is Plato?s Parmenides, a strange hybrid of ideas taken from Parmenides himself plus elements of Zeno and Melissus; Aristotle?s Parmenides, which impedes the reality of movement, a fundamental postulate of physics; the Parmenides of other ancient philosophers such as Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus and Simplicius. Not to mention other Parmenides forged in the context of modern and contemporary philosophy, such as Hegel?s ?idealist? Parmenides, for whom the identity between thinking and being encloses ?the fundamental thinking of Parmenides?, to the extent that true philosophy begins in him; the Parmenides of Nietzsche, the least Greek of all in his philosophy of the tragic era, that of cold and petrifying logical abstractions; Heidegger?s Parmenides, in whose fragments the posterior forgetting of being still does not resonate, but rather the ?dawn of deconcealment (a)lh/qeia) of being? as presence; Popper?s ?cosmological? Parmenides; the Parmenides of ?inseparability of the truth faced with the multiplicity of opinions? proposed by Gadamer; or lastly the Parmenides of Badiou, who subscribes the fusion between the subjective authority of the poem and the ?mathematical interruptions?. What can be done in order to not lose oneself amid all these Parmenides conceived by ancient, modern and contemporary commentators? In this paper, I would like to focus primarily on one of many readings of Parmenides which, in the face of such a diversity of points of view, looks critically at this web of comments that in most cases, since we are not talking about philosophy ?historians?, were made with the intention of backing up the commentators? own philosophical ideas or purely out of a fondness for erudition. I am referring to Cordero?s reading in his last book on Parmenides: By Being, It is (Siendo, se es). Here we can read his definitive settling of accounts with Parmenides? ?venerable?, ?profound? and ?enigmatic? philosophical thesis. Secondly, I intend to undertake a Borgesian reading of the Parmenides arising from this book. In other words, a reading of a reading.