Melissus

Melissus of Samos was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher associated with the Eleatic school and active in the 5th century BCE. Little is known about his life beyond his name and his association with the city of Samos. His philosophical views are preserved only in fragments quoted by later writers, most notably in doxographies derived from Aristotle and Simplicius, making precise details hard to verify.

Melissus is best known for a stringent form of monism. He argued that Being is one, indivisible, and without parts. It is eternal, ungenerated, and immovable, extending infinitely without boundary. From this, he concluded that there cannot be plurality, coming-to-be, or passing-away, nor any void or empty space. Since Being is complete and continuous, motion and change are appearances of the senses rather than real features of the world. To Melissus, there is no true generation or destruction; existence does not arise from nothing, and non-being does not exist in any meaningful sense.

His position represents an aggressive development of Parmenidean thought, insisting that any claim about change or multiplicity must ultimately be reconciled with the impossibility of non-being. Critics, including later Eleatics and subsequent philosophers, challenged these conclusions, particularly on the realities of change, motion, and plurality. Because the surviving material is fragmentary, assessments of Melissus’s arguments vary, and his exact theses are the subject of scholarly debate. Nonetheless, he remains a significant figure in the Eleatic attempt to define the nature of being and reality.