Velia in the context of "Eleatic school"

Parmenides of Elea (/pɑːrˈmɛnɪdiːz ... ˈɛliə/; Ancient Greek: Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης; fl. late sixth or early fifth century BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia (Southern Italy).

Parmenides was born in the Greek colony of Elea to a wealthy and illustrious family. The exact date of his birth is not known with certainty; on the one hand, according to the doxographer Diogenes Laërtius, Parmenides flourished in the period immediately preceding 500 BC, which would place his year of birth around 540 BC; on the other hand, in the dialogue Parmenides Plato portrays him as visiting Athens at the age of 65, when Socrates was a young man, c. 450 BC, which, if true, suggests a potential year of birth of c. 515 BC. Parmenides is thought to have been in his prime (or "floruit") around 475 BC.

Phocaea or Phokaia (Ancient Greek: Φώκαια, Phókaia; modern-day Foça in Turkey) was an ancient Ionian Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia. Greek colonists from Phocaea founded the colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseille, in France) in 600 BC, Emporion (modern-day Empúries, in Catalonia, Spain) in 575 BC and Elea (modern-day Velia, in Campania, Italy) in 540 BC.

Zeno of Elea (/ˈziːnoʊ ... ˈɛliə/; Ancient Greek: Ζήνων ὁ Ἐλεᾱ́της; c. 490 – c. 430 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea, in Southern Italy (Magna Graecia). He was a student of Parmenides and one of the Eleatics. Zeno defended his instructor's belief in monism, the idea that only one single entity exists that makes up all of reality. He rejected the existence of space, time, and motion. To disprove these concepts, he developed a series of paradoxes to demonstrate why they are impossible. Though his original writings are lost, subsequent descriptions by Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, and Simplicius of Cilicia have allowed study of his ideas.

Zeno's arguments are divided into two different types: his arguments against plurality, or the existence of multiple objects, and his arguments against motion. Those against plurality suggest that for anything to exist, it must be divisible infinitely, meaning it would necessarily have both infinite mass and no mass simultaneously. Those against motion invoke the idea that distance must be divisible infinitely, meaning infinite steps would be required to cross any distance.

Ascea is a town and comune in the province of Salerno in the Campania region of southwestern Italy. In the communal territory are the Greek ruins of Velia. It is part of the Cilento traditional area; the maritime touristic part of the municipality is the Marina di Ascea. The town is located on the beach and is popular with European tourists in the summer months.

The Statesman (Ancient Greek: Πολιτικός, Politikós; Latin: Politicus), also known by its Latin title, Politicus, is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato. The text depicts a conversation among Socrates, the mathematician Theodorus, another person named Socrates (referred to as "Socrates the Younger"), and an unnamed philosopher from Elea referred to as "the Stranger" (ξένος, xénos). It is ostensibly an attempt to arrive at a definition of "statesman," as opposed to "sophist" or "philosopher" and is presented as following the action of the Sophist.

The Sophist had begun with the question of whether the sophist, statesman, and philosopher were one or three, leading the Eleatic Stranger to argue that they were three but that this could only be ascertained through full accounts of each (Sophist 217b). But though Plato has his characters give accounts of the sophist and statesman in their respective dialogues, it is most likely that he never wrote a dialogue about the philosopher.