Parmenides Foundation



The Parmenides Foundation, established in Italy in the year 2000, is named after the presocratic philosopher Parmenides, who lived and taught in Elea in Lower Italy in the 6th century. He was the first to inquire systematically into the relationship between thinking and reality, and to reveal the power of logical thought.

Purpose of the foundation is to provide a platform for advanced interdisciplinary research on thinking. Despite promising progress in various branches of the neurosciences, we still know rather little on the meso-level, i.e. what actually happens in the human brain when we form a complex thought.

This seems quite paradoxical as thinking is definitively the most complex, fascinating, and characteristic capability of human beings. In addition, thinking is also of rapidly growing practical relevance, both, in terms of coping with more and more complex challenges and in terms of becoming the core value creation process in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.

The foundation has convened an international faculty of more than 30 esteemed experts representing the various fields relevant for the study of thinking (neurosciences, philosophy, neuroinformatics, cognitive psychology, linguistics, evolutionary anthropology). In addition there is an interdisciplinary core team especially focussing on two areas: developing an integrative conceptual framework and testing respective hypotheses via various imaging techniques (especially fMRI, EEG and NIRS) as well as in complementary behavioural studies. The activities of the core team are supported by a sabbatical and guest fellow program.

The foundation is a cooperative research partner of the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität of Munich and its small research team collaborates closely with the faculties of experimental and developmental psychology, philosophy, and medicine.

Parmenides Faculty:

Harald Atmanspacher, IGPP, Freiburg; Evan Balaban, McGill University, Montreal; Niels Birbaumer Universities of Tübingen and Trento; Per Aage Brandt, Case Western Reserve University; Wilfried Brauer, Technical University of Munich; Michael von Brück, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität Munich; Lin Chen, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing; Seán Cleary, Witwatersrand University; Wolfgang Fikentscher, Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, Munich; Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt University Berlin; Giorgio Innocenti, Karolinska Institute; Sean Kelly, Princeton University; Martin Kemp, University of Oxford; Georg Kreutzberg, Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried; George Lakoff, University of California, Berkeley; Nikos Logothetis, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen; Lamberto Maffei, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Italian National Research Council; Yoshihiro Miyake, Tokyo Institute of Technology; Ulises C. Moulines, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität Munich; Albrecht von Müller, Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking; Rafael Núñez, University of California, San Diego; Rolf Pfeifer, AI Lab, University of Zurich; Ernst Pöppel, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität Munich and Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking; Helge Ritter, University of Bielefeld; Wulf Schiefenhövel, Max Planck Institute for Human Ethology; Olaf Sporns, Indiana University; Eörs Szathmáry, Collegium Budapest; Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität Munich; Semir Zeki, University College London.