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According to the Eleatic Principle, only items which have the capacity to affect or be affected are. Recently, there has been a question about what, if anything, is Eleatic about the Eleatic Principle (EP). I examine the purported origins of the EP in Plato’s Sophist and argue that the text presents three ways in which something can affect or be affected: (1) as tangible contact, (2) as Cambridge change, and (3) by being responsible for the way something else is. Next, I look to the historical Eleatics in search of precursors to the EP. Against recent work in this area, I argue that elements of the EP are present in Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. The poem of Parmenides is compatible with (1) and (2) through the interaction of Light and Night, and the characterization of what-is as knowable. Zeno’s moving arrow paradox employs elements of (2), while his argument from complete divisibility adds preconditions to (3). Finally, against the traditional view that Melissus denies the existence of the sensible world, I show that for Melissus, the sensible world exists alongside what-is. The causal link between what-is and the sensible world, along with Melissus’ commitment to what-is as the object of knowledge renders Melissus the Eleatic whose Eleaticism is most represented in the Eleatic Principle. Alternatives for the application of the EP in contemporary metaphysics and reasons for the inclusion of an Eleatic visitor as the main interlocutor of a dialogue that is often taken as a criticism of Eleaticism emerge.

At Varro LL VI.56 and SE M 8.275-276, we find reports of the Stoic view that children and articulate non-rational animals such as parrots cannot genuinely speak. Absent from these testimonia is the peculiar case of the superficiality of the actor’s speech, which appears in one edition of the unstable text of PHerc 307.9 containing fragments of Chrysippus’ Logical Investigations. Commentators who include this edition of the text in their discussions of the Stoic theory of speech do not offer a univocal account of the superficiality of the parrot’s, the child’s, and the actor’s speech. In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of the Stoic account of genuine and superficial speech and show that not only is there an account of superficial speech that univocally explains the superficiality of the speech of parrots, children, and actors, but that this account challenges traditional assumptions about the entities at the heart of the Stoic theory of language—lekta. It will turn out that genuine speech is the expression of a lekton by way of performing a speech act, and that this account of superficial speech can be used to explain other linguistic phenomena that are of interest to the Stoics, such as sentences in insoluble sophisms and sentences containing demonstratives that do not refer to anything in the subject term. Importantly, my reconstruction shows, against the near consensus view of lekta, that lekta do not primarily explain what makes an utterance meaningful. Rather, they primarily explain what makes an utterance an instance of genuine speech.

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How comes [the mind] to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety?Locke (Essay II.1. ii)1 For why the Theory of Forms is not a conceptualist theory of universals see for instance Cherniss (1944) pp. 214-216. That Socrates' suggestion in this part of the text amounts to conceptualism is defended, for example, by Allen (1983) and Helmig (2007), among many others, and seems to be the dominant view. One exception is the view defended in Bossi (2005), which I discuss in §2.2 The Parmenides is an immensely rich dialogue, and all of its difficulties cannot be addressed in one paper. I set aside speculation about the target of Plato's anti-conceptualism, as well as questions about the dramatic and philosophical allusions or qualifications Plato might intend in making Parmenides the main interlocutor in this dialogue. I also set aside the question of whether the Parmenides of this dialogue is deploying a sincere criticism of the Theory of Forms. 3 The language of numerical and predicational unity belongs to Curd (1986). I will use 'unity' and 'oneness' interchangeably. The language of 'bearing' and 'acquiring' a Form, or 'bearing', 'holding', and 'expressing' a predicate is also deliberately ambiguous so as to not beg questions.