Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > The Presocratic Philosophers > Status Update

are separated by other bodies or by gaps
(which B 3 rules out), or else they abut one another (which the Arrow rules out); if
infinitely divisible, then either the division is completable (which B 2 rules out) or it is
not (which the Dichotomy and the Achilles rule out). By a happy chance, the logoi we
possess form a single integrated construction.5

Some scholars are not content with the information that Zeno’s tract contained forty
logoi: they attempt to discern a grand architectonic structure uniting several of the logoi
into a complex and sophisticated argument against pluralism. Thus Zeno is bent on
attacking pluralism: if the world is divisible into parts, then it is finitely or infinitely
divisible; if finitely divisible, then its parts

and they have accordingly advanced the palliative thesis that the Way of Opinion is a
way of plausibility or verisimilitude or probability, and not exactly a way of falsehood.

Way of Truth, and the second the Way of Opinion.
The Way of Opinion is paved with falsity: ‘there is no true trust’ along it, and its
description is ‘deceitful’. It could hardly be stated more plainly that the Way of Opinion
is a Way of Falsity. Many scholars have found themselves incapable of believing that
one half of Parmenides’ work should have been devoted to the propagation of untruths;

Parmenides

Xenophanes om övertygelse contra sanning.

those law-breakers and malingerers, who are inevitably to be found, will suffer
discomforts, either terrestrial or eschatological, for their temerarious disobedience. As
you will act, so you should act—and if you don’t God help you.

Holders of such a Heraclitean position have three theses to maintain: first, that every
event, and consequently every human action, occurs in accordance with some universal
law or set of laws; second, that men ought, therefore, to give destiny a helping hand and
accommodate their actions to the demands of the universal legislature; and third, that

way can this cause communicate this reality to it, unless it possesses it itself?’
(Meditation III).

Descartes, om platon/aristoteles, medhåll: This emerges plainly from a passage in which Descartes
employs a particular instance of the principle: ‘Now it is manifest by the natural light
that there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in its effect.
For, pray, whence can the effect derive its reality if not from its cause? And in what...