Abstract
What are we to make of tradition's attribution to Thales of the doctrine that everything is animate and " full of gods " (δαιμόνωνπλῆρες, Aetius I 7, 11) ? To follow the proposals presented by Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge in her work on the notion of daimōn,we will explore the hypothesis that daimōn might have served, in Ionian philosophy from Thales to Heraclitus, to decline the principle's power of action, in an anonymous form. And we will seek, in the proem and the second part of Parmenides' poem, a confirmation of this hypothesis, possibly in a critical form.
