Parmenidesについての英文
Parmenides of Elea
c. 510–? 440BC
‘One cannot know that which is not –that is impossible’
Little is known of Parmenides’ life and background, and fragments of a poem entitled On Nature are all that survive of his work. Nevertheless, it contains one of the first examples of reasoned argument in which, perhaps as a reaction to Heraclitus, Parmenides attempts to prove that change is impossible and that reality is singular, undivided and homogenous.
In the first part of his poem, ‘The Way of Truth’, which was revealed to him, he claims, in meeting with a goddess, Parmenides distinguishes between an inquiry into what is and an inquiry into what is not. The latter, he says, is impossible. ‘One cannot know that which is not –that is impossible –nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought, that is’.
The essence of this somewhat cryptic argument is that in order to think of something which is not –let us say, ‘a unicorn’ for example –one must be thinking of something: there must be some idea present to the mind, presumably the idea of a unicorn. But to think of a unicorn means that the unicorn (or the idea of a unicorn) exists in the mind, and therefore it cannot be truly said that unicorns completely fail to exist. The argument turns principally on two complex issues.
冒頭の ‘One cannot know that which is not –that is impossible’ について
「人はそれが存在していないことを知ることができない。それは不可能である。」という意味ですか？thatは代名詞、whichは関係代名詞ですか？
‘One cannot know that which is not –that is impossible –nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought, that is’. について
for it is the same thing that can be thought, that is’.のthat isはthat is impossibleですか？
最後のit cannot be truly said that unicorns completely fail to exist. について
fail toは、～し損なう、という意味だと思うのですが、 fail to existで、「存在し損なう」と訳すと意味が取りにくいです。ここのfail to～はどういう意味合いになるのでしょうか？
以下次の英文が続きます。
First, exactly what is meant by ‘exists’ here? What is the difference between existing in the world and existing in the mind? This begins a controversy that will reappear throughout much of the history of philosophy in many different contexts, but most notoriously in Anselm’s ontological argument, some 1500 years later.
Second, what are the connections between thoughts, words, and things? If that debate started with Parmenides, it has taxed almost every major thinker ever since, up to and including the seminal works of the twentieth century by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine.
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