Showing results for "The Voids" in Greek & Roman

Twenty-four centuries ago, in a windblown town on the northern coast of Greece, a man who reportedly could not stop laughing made one of the strangest and most consequential claims in the history of thought. Everything you have ever seen or tasted or feared, he said, is built from just two ingredients: tiny indivisible bodies, and the empty space they move through. He called that empty space nothing, and then he did something no one had dared to do before him. He insisted that nothing is every bit as real as something.

Everyone thinks they know Parmenides. He was the odd man of ancient Greece who used cold logic to prove that motion is impossible, that change is a fraud, and that your own eyes are liars. He is the philosopher common sense loves to hate, filed away as a curiosity between two more agreeable neighbors. This book argues that almost everything in that portrait is upside down, and that the real Parmenides was not the enemy of the living world but its unlikeliest comforter.