Language and Naming in Early Greek Philosophy

This paper will explore Empedocles’ remarks on language, nature and learning, arguing that one can deduce from them a set of radical doctrines: in spite of common usage, there is no real φύσις (“nature”), but every apparent φύσις is the result of learning, and indeed even the roots (or Empedoclean elements), in constituting and reconstituting the cosmos and all of the individual natures within it, can be said to learn. The general treatment of learning in Empedocles’ poetry has received some attention, e.g.

Language and word play are crucial to Parmenides' poem. That is especially the case in the proem, which, as any incipit, is of pivotal importance.A verse-by-verse analysis of the proem allows us to discern the semantic and syntactic similarities with the pre-Parmenidian poetic traditions. From a structural standpoint, the entire poem proceeds, as it were, in circles (Osborne 1998: 33-34, Miller 2006: 15). Recent scholarship has explored its cyclical design, especially in B8, the central fragment of the poem (e.g. Sellmer 1998).

Scholars have come to recognize that, for the archaic Greeks, words are physical things: they pass the barrier of the teeth or are fenced in there, fly through the air, and penetrate the body of their audience. (Nussbaum 1972a,b; Vivante 1975; Lesher 1983). Less recognized, however, is the persistence of this conception of language throughout the classical period and its significance for early Greek philosophy.

In a recent thought-provoking article, Rose Cherubin (2017) argues that the language of Alêtheia imports images, concepts and assumptions from the ‘human opinions’ (B1.30) that frame Doxa, the cosmology that occupies the latter part of Parmenides’ poem and that Parmenides brands as, in some sense, ‘deceptive’ (B8.52). Alêtheia thus rejects human opinions through arguments which, in various ways, take the concepts and assumptions of human opinions as their starting points.

Several early Greek philosophers identified problems, puzzles, and paradoxes that they traced to linguistic conventions and usages. These difficulties seemed to be implicated in, and thus to challenge, the use of everyday language to describe and investigate what is. In apparent accord with Parmenides’ goddess’s injunctions, Empedocles and Anaxagoras both proclaim that those who speak of coming to be and perishing go wrong (Anaxagoras B17, Empedocles B8 and B9).