While the Milesians were trying to work out what material the world was made of, the Greeks of Southern Italy and Sicily – in the late 6th and 5th centuries BC – were experimenting with other ideas that would soon work their way into the mainstream of European philosophy.
The Pythagoreans were fascinated by the mathematical structure they thought they could see in the universe. Parmenides caused a sensation by proving logically that there can be no change, no movement, no coming into being or ceasing to be. His follower, Zeno, wrote the famous paradoxes which prove in more detail that plurality and movement are logically impossible.
The notion that there is a world behind the appearances which can be grasped logically, however counterintuitive its contents, is now familiar. I shall demonstrate the fallacy on which Parmenides’ version is based.