Parmenides

Parmenides of Elea was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea, a Greek colony in Magna Graecia in southern Italy, who flourished in the late sixth or early fifth century BC. The only work known to be by him is a philosophical poem in dactylic hexameter verse, often called On Nature, whose original title is unknown. Only fragments survive, but the poem is better preserved than the works of almost any other pre-Socratic philosopher, which lets classicists reconstruct its doctrines with some precision. In it he sets out two views of reality: the way of Aletheia, or truth, in which all reality is one, change is impossible and existence is timeless and uniform, and the way of Doxa, or opinion, which describes the deceptive world of appearances. He is regarded as the founder of ontology and of the Eleatic school, which included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos, and through his influence on Plato he shaped the whole history of Western philosophy.