Parmenides is one of the
dialogues of
Plato. It is widely considered to be one of the more, if not the most, challenging and enigmatic of
Plato's dialogues. The
Parmenides purports to be an account of a meeting between the two great philosophers of the
Eleatic school,
Parmenides and
Zeno of Elea, and a young
Socrates. The occasion of the meeting was the reading by Zeno of his treatise defending Parmenidean
monism against those partisans of plurality who asserted that Parmenides' supposition that there is a one gives rise to intolerable absurdities and contradictions.