An Ecofeminist Approach to Parmenides' Enigma

Augusto Angel has been one of the most influential authors in Colombian environmentalism. One of his main concerns was the role metaphysics has played in current ecological crisis. In his book El Enigma de Parmenides he analyzed the story of metaphysics in Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, Renaissance and First Modernity. Nonetheless, his work has not been integrated with other ecological approaches like ecofeminism which have also focused on the roots of current ecological crisis. Ecofeminism has stated that the modern world view has been built around conceptual frameworks, i.e., theories based on value dualisms and value hierarchical thinking, but it has not taken into account the role of metaphysics in it. Hence, the purpose of this paper was to determine the conceptual framework of the main Greek authors. For this, works by Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle were analyzed by the theory of conceptual frameworks developed by ecofeminism. It was found that the organizing categories of Parmenidian, Platonic and Aristotelian theories are truth/opinion, reason/sensation and soul/body, respectively. It was also found that Greek metaphysics created two epistemological principals that have shaped Western world view: the search for a universal, unsituated, and unembodied knowledge, as well as the logic of identity.