The traditional interpretation of Eleatism has it that Melissus was a disciple of Parmenides and that Parmenides believed in the timeless eternity of Being. It seems, on the contrary, that Melissus acknowledged the reality of time by conceiving eternity as infinite time. Failing to justify this particular divergence from Parmenides’ approach, certain authors held that it was necessary to reinterpret the Melissan eternity as a form of infinite timelessness. This paper attempts to demonstrate that this reading is groundless and that (...) if the traditional interpretation is questioned then one should reconsider the assumptions and but not. (shrink)

For a long time, Parmenides has been considered the first real metaphysician in history, a theorist of a disembodied being, unreachable by the scientific knowledge of the world. In his Eleatic Lectures, Giovanni Cerri goes back to his renown interpretation of Parmenides as a scientist fully aware of the epistemological foundations of knowledge, and capable of foreshadowing the ultimate outcome of the evolution of science, that is, the discovery of being as a single homogeneous body. Cerri also shows that the (...) works of two other thinkers who were trained in the heart of the school of Elea itself support his interpretation: on the one hand Zeno, with his arguments against plurality; on the other hand Leucippus, the inventor of atomism. Ten scholars have been called to discuss this broad interpretation of a crucial page in the history of thought. Cerri replies to each of them in the final pages of the volume, engaging in a dense dialogue. (shrink)