Parmenides of Elea: An Introduction to his Life and Thought

To the gentry...
soli deo gloria.

You can find my corresponding essay here:
https://premieretat.com/making-the-eleatic-stranger-parmenides-and-the-phenomenology-of-non-ordinary-reality/

In this video, I argue that the life and work of Parmenides of Elea is substantially weirder than it is assumed to be in standard accounts in the history of Western philosophy. Rather than a proto-rationalist who denounces experience to cling to a realm of pure logic and deductive inference, Parmenides was a skilled shaman and experiencer, and his account of his journey to encounter an unnamed goddess parallels those of earlier iatromantis figures and contemporary alien abductees. Likewise, the argument he propounds in his poem "On Nature" is best understood as a phenomenology of two forms of consciousness, with one section, The Way of Truth, focusing on the ecstatic experience of non-ordinary reality, and the other, The Way of Opinion, focusing on the everyday experience of ordinary reality. Parmenides' presence at the foundations of Western metaphysics injects an irreducible element of high-strangeness into the very foundations of Western culture and thought.