>>24942361
>defeated Pericles twice
based

Greeks were fucking retards. The whole concept of the noumenal being eternally true and higher than the phenomenal is so schizophrenic and egotistical that it has been the cancer on European thought ever since. Thank fuck the mystics who actually find things out for themselves instead of arguing like faggots managed to gain ground against it.

>>24942361
Great to see a thread about Melissus. He should be treated as just as important as Parmenides, his work is excellent in its own right and goes well with Parmenides.

I disagree with your two claims re: contradicting Parmenides, but perhaps that is part of the fun - seeing how to interpret things. The bit about limited vs unlimited is an ongoing dispute in the literature, I personally think they're saying the same thing from different angles. Specifically:

Parmenides is speaking of reality as limited because it must be definite - it is what it is. So the particular point is about definiteness, and can also be taken as another challenge against change.

Melissus is pointing out that it's unlimited because there is no other thing outside it to hem it in. He isn't denying its definiteness imo, he's pointing out that if people think that things are limited by their container, or by other things that they do not encompass, then the One/whole of reality is unlimited because we can't posit some external thing to serve as the limitation.

I also disagree with the dispute re: doxa/seemings. I don't see any way for either author to call something a "pure falsehood" that is not "part of [the] larger whole [of reality]". Funnily enough I agree with your interpretation of Parmenides if you're saying that whatever meaning there is in the doxa, it is what it is (hence real and of the whole), and the only question is how to understand it (ie: how to give an account consistent with the nature of being). That interpretation is not necessarily the most popular, but either way I think it is the philosophically correct position. I just think Melissus can be read as following suit for two reasons. In the accepted fragments, he speaks of the elements and how one thing supposedly becomes another, and then he says IF that's the case, then each thing would be what it is - I think he's saying much what Parmenides is saying, which is that there's a bunch of confused bullshit out there where people are confused and/or deceived, and that if we're going to find any of that meaningful then it must be just as the (Melissean) One is. Also, depending on how far you want to go for additional source material, there is a theory that a Metrodorus of Chios fragment is actually a Melissus of Samos fragment under a wrong name, and if you go read it you will absolutely see why. In that fragment, which itself is broken up a bit, there is a natural science discussion, suggesting that maybe Melissus had a Doxa section to his own work.

Anyway, last bit: I don't like calling them "lost Eleactics". Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno are presumably the three you're thinking of, and they're not really "lost". Their complete body of work has been lost, but there's a lot of material out there to read. If anything, of the three Zeno would be the lost one. But here, let me give you a real lost one of whom almost no record remains: Lamiscus the Samian.

>>24944509

>I don't see any way for either author to call something a "pure falsehood" that is not "part of [the] larger whole [of reality]". Funnily enough I agree with your interpretation of Parmenides if you're saying that whatever meaning there is in the doxa, it is what it is (hence real and of the whole), and the only question is how to understand it (ie: how to give an account consistent with the nature of being). That interpretation is not necessarily the most popular, but either way I think it is the philosophically correct position.

That is definitively the correct way to interpret Parmenides. "dood what if everything is a dream???" is an extremely banal thing people read into the poem. Don't be that guy

>>24944509
Also I was only calling Melissos lost since nobody even knows about him or cares about him at all whereas Zeno and Parmenides endure. It's a mixture of those two having more surviving works and Melissos' thought having been viewed as dubious even within his own era - Polybus dedicates the beginning paragraph of his On the Nature of man to insulting Melissos (by name) and the Ionian school of thought.

>>24944509
Greek writer Polybus on debates between Ionian school and Eleatic school which he witnessed in his own time. -

> "The best way to realise this is to be present at their debates. Given the same debaters and the same audience, the same man
never wins in the discussion three times in succes-
sion, but now one is victor, now another, now he
who happens to have the most glib tongue in the
face of the crowd. Yet it is right that a man who
claims correct knowledge about the facts should
maintain his own argument victorious always, if his
knowledge be knowledge of reality and if he set it
forth correctly. But in my opinion such men by
their lack of understanding overthrow themselves
in the words of their very discussions, and establish the theory of Melissus"

The formatting is really fucked. I tried

Source:

https://archive.org/details/hippocrates04hippuoft/hippocrates04hippuoft/page/4/mode/1up

>>24942361
>he said that Being was necessarily unlimited because to limit it would require something to exist outside of Being which is impossible
That's not self-evident at all.

>Melissus held flat out that all Doxa and change is illusory like a mirage. He would say Doxa is just pure falsehood rather than being part of a larger whole.
That just doesn't make any sense. Was this guy retarded?

>>24942361
why does this guy have the male version of my sister's name?

>>24945236
>>Melissus, while also an Eleatic who defended the unity and immutability of being, uses arguments that suggest a more direct, logical conflict between sensory evidence and the conclusions of reason. Instead of simply dismissing sense experience as a separate, illusory path, Melissus employs counterfactual statements and a radical form of modal reasoning to demonstrate that one cannot consistently hold both that "what-is is sempiternal and immutable" and that "sense experience is reliable". His approach is an attempt to prove the unreliability of sense-based opinions through a rigorous, self-sufficient deductive process, rather than presenting the doxa as a separate, untrustworthy cosmological account

>>24945224
Sadly, the platonist reading caught on and now you'll invariably encounter retards talking about a "shadow world" of illusions.

>>24945231
Melissus has more surviving direct quotations than Zeno for sure. But yeah, people have been seething about Melissus from day one - Plato and Aristotle also name him and try to avoid good faith engagement via denigration and misrepresentation. He clearly had his fans, but we aren't allowed to hear about them... Megarians, Dialecticians, these people who possessed genuine philosophical insight.

Re: the Polybus section, I don't take that as necessarily an insult to Melissus. But there is also an important additional observation - it is the earliest reference to an Eleatic, and it isn't Parmenides. It is Melissus. Similarly, Melissus seems to have been a big name in other sources, perhaps eclipsing Parmenides, and it is Melissus who really established "One" as a title for Being. Another teaching perverted by cringe (neo)platonists.

>>24945707
Yes you are right about Polybus. It is more accurately an insult directly to Ionians and the followers of such philosophers for engaging negatively with Eleatics that they essentially support through shared monism.

>>it is the earliest reference to an Eleatic, and it isn't Parmenides. It is Melissus.

That stood out to me as well. Yes. That he chose Melissus as the Eleatic he would reference to denigrate Ionians and the Eleatic he chose was this less known third guy Melissus not Parmenides or Zeno.

>>24945707
>Sadly, the platonist reading caught on and now you'll invariably encounter retards talking about a "shadow world" of illusions.

I have had this very discussion on the board before. That the Greek word used by Parmenides is “dokimos” which he claims is to be meant as believed in an illusory sense and he claimed I was wrong when I took it to mean the world is believed as a part of Being. Basically the translation I used had dokimos as “correctly evaluated” and this poster had a hissy fit over it.