Parmenides' insight and the possibility of logic

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explain and render more accessible the arguments in a recent, important, and already famously difficult book and, on the basis of this appreciation and illumination, to level a criticism of the book that cuts deep and thereby opens up a new and powerful path to a paradoxical Parmenideanism. The book in question is Irad Kimhi's Thinking and Being. Kimhi is to be applauded for taking seriously Parmenidean challenges to negation and to nonbeing and for offering devastating criticisms of a Fregean (and Cartesian) distinction between the force and content of judgments, a distinction that Kimhi rightly shows to trade on unintelligible primitives. Nonetheless, in his response to the Parmenidean challenges, Kimhi is guilty of reliance on a number of similarly unintelligible primitives of his own. This failure on Kimhi's part leads the way to a radical Parmenidean view according to which distinctions, in general, are rejected.