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Tallis in Wonderland

Reality & Stability: From Parmenides to Einstein

Raymond Tallis wonders how stability has changed.

What is really real? In addressing this time-honoured (or, pessimists fear, eternity-honoured) question, philosophers have looked increasingly to science for answers. The result has not always been very satisfactory, as I have often complained in this column. We are invited, cajoled, or bullied into believing that fundamental reality is remote from anything we can experience, intuit, or even imagine.

Philosophers of course are not entirely innocent in this regard: they have often proposed unimaginable ways of conceiving the world; and, unlike physicists, they have not rewarded us with technologies that have transformed our lives. The greatest of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides, denied the reality of change.

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