Abstract

FERNANDEZ MOUJAN, Raimundo. There is no such thing as separation: Similarities between Parmenides’ poem and Plato’s Sophist. Sig. Fil [online]. 2020, vol.22, n.43, pp.8-33.  Epub Apr 25, 2022. ISSN 1665-1324.

In several passages of his poem, Parmenides identifies not-being with separation: “You will not sever what is from holding to what is”. Not-being is impossible means, thus, that there is no cut, no strip, no ditch inside being, by which not-being would pass. Being has no cracks in it, no interstices. There are no ontological separations. Plato sees this clearly: in Sophist he says that separation is “a-philosophical”, and defines being as capacity of relation. Is not there a sort of “deduction” to point out there, one that goes form Parmenides’ estín, to the Platonic dúnamis koinonías, by way of the impossibility of ontological separation? And is it possible to identify, in that continuity, a fundamental prevention against all substantialisms, against all understandings of the world as made of separated independent substances? In this article I investigate the relation, and even continuity, between Parmenides’ and Plato’s definitions of being. A relation in which the impossibility of separation is the key element.

Keywords : substantialism; being; non-being; potency; relation.

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