10/01/2026
Dear philosophers and classicists:
Our beloved friend and colleague Stephen White will be returning to Waggener Hall for a couple of events this week!
On Thursday afternoon, 3:30-6:30pm in WAG 210, he’ll be leading a seminar on “Knowledge of Universal Correlations in Parmenides.” All are invited to attend.
Then on Friday afternoon, 3:30-5:30pm in the Miller Conference Room (WAG 316), he’ll be giving a colloquium talk entitled “Universality in Parmenides.” Here’s an abstract for the talk:
Parmenides proposes a model of inquiry designed to secure knowledge of “well-trusted truth”. But the stringent conditions he establishes for this knowledge threaten to make the natural world around us unknowable. Many interpreters endorse this result and cite the poem’s dismissive treatment of “mortal beliefs” as confirmation. Others counter that the poem explicitly affirms knowledge of the external world, though only of an inferior kind exemplified by its own theories. On either account, our cognitive grip on the natural world is only a shadow of a superior kind of understanding. The talk will explore some prospects for bridging, narrowing, or closing this gap by analyzing the poem’s reliance on universality at key points in its argumentation. If successful inquiry in any domain depends on discovering universal correlations (universals said universally, in Aristotelian lingo), then the poem’s theories may satisfy its initial conditions for knowledge.
