Karl Popper, Parmenides

I read Poppers ten essays on the World of Parmenides. I read Parmenides a long time ago, when I was sixteen, and I remember him as one of the hardest reads ever, right up there with Being and Nothingness, Sartre's dissertation, which I read the same summer. I also recall I taught myself Chopin's Nocturne in E Major then. Learning the piano was easy. Parmenides was hard.

There are some interesting comments about my great foe, Aristotle. "Aristotle breaks with the reasonable tradition that says we know very little. He thinks he knows a lot..." (p. 2 of my edition, Routledge 1998). Popper also cites Kirk and Raven, that 'gross departures from common sense must only be accepted when the evidence for them is extremely strong." (p. 20) I also thought his point about the continuation of the cosmology of the Greeks being the science of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, and that our our civilization is abased upon that science. (p. 105) And finally, kind words for my sore academic's heart: "I suggest that, as philosophers, we have a very special critical task -- the task of swimming against the tide. thus we should try, in spite of our critical attitude, to help and support any neglected idea, however unpromising, and especially any new idea; for new ideas are are; and even if there is only a little truth in some of them, they may perhaps indicate an intellectual need, or perhaps some confusion within the set of ideas that we have uncritically accepted so far." (p. 147)

And in closing, back to Aristotle. "Aristotlelian logic is the theory of demonstrable knowledge, and Dante was right when he called Aristotle 'the master of all who know'. He is the founder of the proof, the apodeixis; of the apodeitic syllogism. He is a scientist in the scientistic sense and the theoretician of scientific proof and the authoritarian claims of Science. Yet Aristotle himself became the discoverer (or rather the rediscoverer of the impossibility of knowledge: of the problem of demonstrable knowledge of of the impossibility of its solution. [Impossible within the Aristotlian epistemology, sure.] For if all knowledge, all science, has to be demonstrable, then this leads us (he discovered0 to an infinite regress. This is because any proof consists of premises and conclusions, of initial statements and of concluding statements; and if the initial statements are yet to be proved, the concluding statements are also yet to be proved." (p. 276)