Melissus Of Samos
Melissus of Samos
A Greek philosopher, of the Eleatic School, b. at Samos about 470 B.C. It is probable that he was a disciple of Parmenides, and that he is identical with the Melissus who, according to Plutarch (Pericles, 26), commanded the Samian fleet which defeated the Athenians off the coast of Samos in 442. He wrote a work which is variously entitled peri tou ontos, peri physeos, etc., and of which only a few fragments have come down to us. In attempting to combine the doctrines of Parmenides with those of the earliest philosophers of Greece (see IONIAN SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY), Melissus, through he fell into many contradictions, forestalled, in a sense, Aristotle’s more successful effort to define the infinite and the incorporeal. Like Parmenides, he depreciated sense-knowledge, and held that change, motion, and multiplicity are illusions. At the same time, he was influenced by the Ionians, especially by Heraclitus, to attach value to the question of origins. He definitely predicates infinity of being, and assets that reality “has no body”. By the infinite he understands “that which has neither beginning nor end”, and in his conception of “that which has no body”, he does not, as Aristotle points out (Metaph. I, 5, 986 b.) attain a correct understanding of the immaterial. The physical doctrines ascribed to Melissus by Philoponus, Stoboeus, Epiphanius, and others do not seem to have been held by him. There is, however, a possibility that, as Diogenes Laërtius informs us, Melissus avoided all mention of the gods because we can know nothing about them. Like Plato, Aristotle, and some of the other Greek philosopher, he probably thought it wisest to take refuge in a profession of ignorance regarding the gods, so as to avoid the imputation of hostility to the popular mythology.
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FAIRBANKS, First Philosophers of Greece (New York, 1898), 120 sq., gives fragments of Melissus’s work, with translations of references to him in Aristotle, Epiphanius, etc.; PABST, De Melissi fragmentis (Bonn, 1880); KERN, Zur Wurdigung des Melissus (Stettin, 1880); ZELLER, Pro-Socratic Philosophy, tr. ALLEYNE, I (Lond., 1881), 627 sq.; TANNERY, Pour l’histoire de la science hellene (Paris, 1887), 262 sq.; TURNER, History of Philosophy (Boston, 1903), 51 sq.
WILLIAM TURNER Transcribed by Dennis P. Knight
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XCopyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Melissus Of Samos
a Greek philosopher, was born at Samos, and flourished in the 5th century (about 444) before Christ. It is said that he was not less distinguished as a citizen than as a philosopher, and that he commanded the fleet of his country during its insurrection against Athens. Melissus seems to have been the disciple of Parmenides; he studied at least the writings of the philosophers of the Eleatic school, and adopted their doctrines in a modified form; or, as one has it, He took up the letter rather than the spirit of their system. He made his opinions known in a work written in Ionic prose, probably entitled Of Being and of Nature. He treated not of the infinite variety of things produced or engendered, but of eternal nature considered abstractly, apart from all concrete things, and, like Parmenides, called it being. Simplicius has preserved some fragments of this treatise, and the author (Aristotle or Theophrastus) of the book on Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias, has made its doctrines well known. Melissus taught the same system of idealism as did the leaders of the Eleatic school, Xenophanes and Parmenides,’but he is characterized by greater boldness in his way of stating it, and in some respects by profounder views. What really existed, he maintained, could neither be produced nor perish; it exists without having either commencement or end; infinite (differing in this respect from Parmenides), and consequently one; invariable, not composed of parts, and indivisible: which doctrine implies a denial of the existence of bodies, and of the dimensions of space. All that our senses present to us (that is to say, the greater part of things which exist) is nothing more than an appearance relative to our senses ( ), and is altogether beyond the limits of real knowledge.
He thus made the first though weak attempt, which was afterwards carried out by Zeno with far more acuteness and sagacity, to prove that the foundations of all knowledge derived from experience are in themselves contradictory, and that the reality of the actual world is inconceivable. As for the relation between real existence and the Deity, we are ignorant of the sentiments of Melissus on this head; for what is reported by Diogenes Laertius (ix. 24) can be considered as relating only to the popular notions. Some important fragments of Melissus have been collected by Brandis in the first part of the Commentationum Eleaticarum, pars prima, p. 185 sq., and by M. Mullach in his excellent edition of the treatise Aristotelis de Melisso, Xenophane, et Gorgia, Disputationes, cum Eleaticorum philosophorum fragmentis (Berlin, 1846). The same editor inserts them in the Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum of the Didot collection (1860, 8vo). See Diogenes Laertius, 9:24; Plutarch, Pericles, p. 26, 27; Simplicius, In Arist. Phys. de Celo.; Ritter, Gesch. der Philosophie, vol. i; Tenneman’s Manual of Philosophy, p. 68, 69; Smith, Dict. of Class. Biog. s.v.; Hoefer, Nouv. Biog. Generale, s.v.