Parmenides is traditionally called "The Father of Metaphysics"; he was the first Western philosopher to push beyond an inquiry into the nature of things to a consideration of philosophical inquiry as such and thus to an analysis of the deep logic of thinking, of knowing, and of being. Through its defining influence on Plato's thought, Parmenidean metaphysics inaugurated the rationalist tradition, which subsequently dominated Western thought for two millennia. The legacy of Parmenides is unmistakable; however, only the faintest traces of his life appear in the surviving texts of antiquity, making it impossible to construct a biography that truly illuminates the mind and character of this revolutionary thinker.

Parmenides was a native of Elea, a Greek city on the western coast of Italy. Evidence from Plato's eponymous dialogue suggests that Parmenides was born there sometime in the penultimate decade of the sixth century B.C. and that he...