And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liver Hume Trust. Today's episode, the The subject of today's episode is arguably the greatest pre-Socratic philosopher,

Parmenides.

Since he is often described as the father of metaphysics, I thought I might start out by saying

a bit about what metaphysics is.

Philosophers tend to see their discipline as being divided up into several related sub-disciplines.

Of course there are the parts of philosophy that tell us what to do, ethics and political philosophy.

Both the word ethics and the word political come from Greek.

In ancient Greek ethos means custom or character, and politique means, well, political because Polis means city.

The other two main areas of philosophy are epistemology and metaphysics, And guess where these words come from? Yes, ancient Greek.

Epistemology is from episteme meaning knowledge and so epistemology is the study of knowledge.

For instance, epistemologists want to know what the difference is between knowledge and mere belief or whether it is possible to know anything at all.

Metaphysics is a bit stranger in its etymology. It really means after physics, and many

later ancient and medieval philosophers took it that metaphysics is quite literally the

discipline one studies after studying physics.

You graduate from studying the physical world to studying the metaphysical world

of immaterial things like God.

Another possible derivation for the word is that Aristotle's book on metaphysics came to be called that because it was studied or just placed on the shelf after his books about physics.

In any case, the science of metaphysics is first explicitly marked out by Aristotle in his book of that title, even though it's not a title he gave it.

Aristotle calls metaphysics first philosophy, first not because it is the first one you would study, but because it is the most fundamental philosophical inquiry.

He tells us that what metaphysics studies is being. In other words, it studies whatever there is, insofar as it is.

This means that many of the traditional problems of philosophy are metaphysical problems. Does God exist? Does the human soul exist? Does anything exist apart from physical bodies? Other topics, like the problem of free will, are usually taken to belong to metaphysics even if they also relate to ethics.

Permannities then was the first philosopher who we can say had a clear interest in metaphysics,

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