Parmenides' Fallacy: Reply

Philip C. Bobbitt

(Image from UT Austin)

Regular readers -- or anybody who has read at least yesterday's blog entry -- will recall that I posed a question about Professor Philip Bobbitt's reference to Parmenides' Fallacy, which "compares present states of affairs not with each other . . . but with the past" (Bobbitt, Terror and Consent, pp. 208). Here's a little reminder:

My sole reason for today's blog entry is to pose a simple question:

Who first identified this fallacy as "Parmenides' Fallacy" or as the "Parmenidean Fallacy"?

I've looked around a bit on the internet but haven't found a source identifying the origin of either "Parmenides' Fallacy" or "Parmenidean Fallacy."

I didn't receive many response. If I recall (counting on my fingers . . .), there were . . . uh, one of them. An old Ozark friend, Jeanie Oliver, suggested:

why don't you email him and ask him (Phillip Bobbitt)

Since Jeanie didn't end that sentence with a question mark, I took it as an imperative and did as she had suggested, writing to Philip Bobbitt and posing my query directly to him:

Dear Professor Bobbitt,

I'm sorry to bother you, but I have a simple query concerning the fallacy that you describe in your recent book, Terror and Consent:

"Who first identified this fallacy as 'Parmenides' Fallacy' or as the 'Parmenidean Fallacy'?"

I blogged this query but have received no answer . . . aside from a suggestion that I email you:

"Parmenides' Fallacy: Query"

This isn't a very important query, so ignore it if you have no time or interest.

At any rate, I'm learning a great deal from your book.

Best Regards,

Jeffery Hodges

To my surprise, I received within an hour a reply from Professor Bobbitt answering my query as to who first identified this error in thinking as the fallacy of Parmenides:

Actually, I did. See page 10, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002) and see "Today's War is Against Tomorrow's Iraq", New York Times, March 10, 2003, at A19.

It was perhaps unfair to use 'Parmenides' to name this Fallacy -- after all he isn't guilty of it, but I thought the name was sufficiently allusive to be helpful.

Thank you for asking. I hope you are enjoying the book and will let me know what you think of it.

Yours,

Philip Bobbitt

That's a useful piece of information, to know that Professor Bobbitt coined the expression "Parmenides' Fallacy." To be frank, I had begun to suspect as much, for all of the online references -- of which there were not very many -- were extraordinarily recent.

Actually, I even found a reference to the "Parmenidean Fallacy" that differs from Professor Bobbitt's coinage and might signify a distinct unit of value having no clear exchange rate with Professor Bobbit's coin (but rather than try to fix an exchange rate, I'll leave that decision up to the marketplace of other people's better ideas):

Thomas Aquinas delivers a proof for the existence of God in which he first shows that there is something that necessarily exists, and then goes on to show that among the things that necessarily exist there must be something that derives its own necessity, and this "all men speak of as God." The main objection to Aquinas’ argument is that it contains a Parmenidean fallacy of substantial change. To counter this objection, we must salvage Aquinas' conclusion by reconciling parts of his argument with a natural philosophy of qualitative change. (David Siegel, "Aquinas' Argument for Necessary Existence," January 24, 2007)

This passage comes from David Siegel, an obviously bright young man studying computer science and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. By "Parmenidean fallacy," Siegel seems to mean a fallacy that Parmenides himself identified, for Siegel nods to "Parmenides' legacy by denying substantial change," which in the context appears to mean that Parmenides considered an appeal to "substantial change" (i.e., change in substance) to be a fallacy of thought.

Interesting.

Well, I've learned two things since yesterday, and these two bright spots of light are now circling each other like binary stars in the darkness of my ignorance, so I'll leave them to their brilliant dance of mutual attraction and go about my night, perceptively more enlightened.

Parmenides' Fallacy: Query

Bust of Parmenides

Frozen in time...

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm currently reading Philip Bobbitt's most recent tome, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Knopf, 2008), which I'll have to report on sometime, but for the moment, I simply want to call attention to a fallacy that he identifies in the following passage:

[A]s we look to the future, we must not simply ask whether our having invaded Iraq will result in our being worse off than we were before the invasion. This is Parmenides' Fallacy, which compares present states of affairs not with each other (the worlds that would be actual today if we had acted differently in the past) but with the past. For we do not have the option of holding time still. (Bobbitt, Terror and Consent, pp. 208-209)

In a footnote to this passage, Bobbitt notes:

Sometimes called the "Parmenidean Fallacy," after the Greek philosopher who held that all change was illusion. This fallacy occurs when one tries to assess a future state of affairs by measuring it against the present, as opposed to comparing it to other possible futures. (Bobbitt, Terror and Consent, p. 592, n. 55)

I should admit, first off, to having been one of those who had wanted to see the weapons' inspections continue, for I thought that we ought to be more sure of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before invading back in 2003. Nevertheless, based on Saddam Hussein's behavior, which seemed to be that of a man with something to hide, I actually believed that Iraq had a WMD program and expected chemical or biological weapons to be found, and I was thus surprised when no such weapons were located after the invasion.

But that's an issue for a different post. My sole reason for today's blog entry is to pose a simple question:

Who first identified this fallacy as "Parmenides' Fallacy" or as the "Parmenidean Fallacy"?

I've looked around a bit on the internet but haven't found a source identifying the origin of either "Parmenides' Fallacy" or "Parmenidean Fallacy."

Any suggestions?