The Eleatics were a group of pre-Socratic philosophers and school of thought in the 5th century BC centered around the ancient Greek colony of Elea (Ancient Greek: Ἐλέα), located around 80 miles south-east of Naples in southern Italy, then known as Magna Graecia.
[1] Many of the historical details mentioned by Plato, Diogenes Laertius, or Apollodorus are generally considered by modern scholarship to be of little value,[1] and there are generally few exact dates that can be verified, so most estimates of dates and relative chronology must rely on interpretations of the internal evidence within the surviving fragments.
[1] The Eleatics rejected the epistemological validity of sense experience, and instead took logical standards of clarity and necessity to be the criteria of truth.
[citation needed] The Eleatics maintained that the true explanation of things lies in the conception of a universal unity of being.
They argued that errors on this point commonly arise from the ambiguous use of the verb to be, which may imply actual physical existence or be merely the linguistic copula which connects subject and predicate.