The conference will be about the ‘Eleatics’, i.e three philosophers from Elea, in Southern Italy, who wrote in the fifth century BC: Permenides, Zenom and Melissus. The last 20 years have seen the development of a host of innovative and philosophically sophisticated approaches to the Eleatics and their influences.
This conference will bring together leading specialists in early philosophy as well as junior scholars in the field. It aims to build on the new interpretations of this early and pivotal period of philosophy and to see whether we can develop a new coherent picture of each of the three Eleatics. A further aim is to measure and evaluate the influence of contemporary philosophical and scientific thought (in its endorsement of atomism and objection to all forms of monism) in the new interpretative trends outlined above.