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Tallis in Wonderland

The Unthinkability of Philosophical Thoughts

Raymond Tallis thinks the deeply unthinkable, as hard as he can.

Perhaps the most dramatic and possibly even the most influential thought in philosophy is Parmenides’ assertion that the universe is an unchanging, undifferentiated unity. He arrived at this conclusion by an argument so simple that if you blink, you miss it. What-is-not, he says, is not. Since what-is-not does not exist, it cannot act either as a womb of that which is coming to be, or a tomb for that which has ceased to be. Things cannot therefore come into being, nor pass away, for they cannot arise out of or pass into what-is-not.

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