Parmenides, Cosmos, and Being

In the philosophical poem he composed around 500 BC, Parmenides presents an anonymous goddess who - like a philosophical Gorgon - denies movement and plurality and propagates an ontology that completely petrifies the world of phenomena. This is the communis opinio, against which the current interpretation is addressed. Challenging this well-known interpretation, Panagiotis Thanassas contends that Parmenidean Truth does not deny the polymorphy of the Cosmos, but rather endeavors to noetically understand its unity as a result of participation in Being. The second and longer part of the poem, the so-called Doxa, then presents a cosmogonic and cosmological "world-arrangement" of divine origin, founded on the combination of the two forms of Light and Night.