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Empedocles (; ; , 444–443 BC) was a Ancient Greece pre-Socratic philosopher and a native citizen of Akragas, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is known best for originating the Cosmogony theory of the four classical elements. He also proposed forces he called Love and Strife which would mix and separate the elements, respectively.
Empedocles challenged the practice of animal sacrifice and killing animals for food. He developed a distinctive doctrine of reincarnation. He is generally considered the last Greek philosopher to have recorded his ideas in verse. Some of his work survives, more than is the case for any other pre-Socratic philosopher. Empedocles' death was mythologized by ancient writers, and has been the subject of a number of literary treatments.
Primary sources of information on the life of Empedocles come from the Hellenistic period, several centuries after his own death and long after any reliable evidence about his life would have perished. Modern scholarship generally believes that these biographical details, including Aristotle's assertion that he was the "father of rhetoric", his chronologically impossible tutelage under Pythagoras, and his employment as a doctor and miracle worker, were fabricated from interpretations of Empedocles' poetry, as was common practice for the biographies written during this time.
Burnet states that, although Empedocles likely did not die in Sicily, both general versions of the story (one in which he kills himself, the other in which he discovers he’s the first man to survive leaving Earth) could be easily accepted by ancient writers, as there was no local tradition to contradict them.
Empedocles's death is the subject of Friedrich Hölderlin's play Tod des Empedokles ( The Death of Empedocles) as well as Matthew Arnold's poem Empedocles on Etna.
Lucretius speaks of him enthusiastically, evidently viewing him as his model. Horace also refers to the death of Empedocles in his work Ars Poetica and admits poets have the right to destroy themselves.
However, as the Modern Greek philosopher Elli Lambridi has argued, while Empedocles seems to have borrowed from the Eleatic tradition (with Parmenides at its centre) as well as from the Heraclitean and Pythagorean schools of thought, his own philosophy is very different from all these three influences. The work of Empedocles, Lambridis suggests, must be seen in relation to the work of the Greeks as a whole that borrowed elements from Egypt, Babylon and other Eastern cultures to produce a totally different philosophy.
The four elements, however, are simple, eternal, and unalterable, and as change is the consequence of their mixture and separation, it was also necessary to suppose the existence of moving powers that bring about mixture and separation. The four elements are both eternally brought into union and parted from one another by two divine powers, Love and ( Philotes and Neikea). Love (φιλότης) is responsible for the attraction of different forms of what we now call matter, and Strife (νεῖκος) is the cause of their separation. If the four elements make up the universe, then Love and Strife explain their variation and harmony. Love and Strife are attractive and repulsive forces, respectively, which are plainly observable in human behavior, but also pervade the universe. The two forces wax and wane in their dominance, but neither force ever wholly escapes the imposition of the other.
As the best and original state, there was a time when the pure elements and the two powers co-existed in a condition of rest and inertness in the form of a sphere. The elements existed together in their purity, without mixture and separation, and the uniting power of Love predominated in the sphere: the separating power of Strife guarded the extreme edges of the sphere. Since that time, strife gained more sway and the bond which kept the pure elementary substances together in the sphere was dissolved. The elements became the world of phenomena we see today, full of contrasts and oppositions, operated on by both Love and Strife. Empedocles assumed a cyclical universe whereby the elements return and prepare the formation of the sphere for the next period of the universe.
Empedocles attempted to explain the separation of elements, the formation of earth and sea, of Sun and Moon, of atmosphere. He also dealt with the first origin of plants and animals, and with the physiology of humans. As the elements entered into combinations, there appeared strange results—heads without necks, arms without shoulders. Then as these fragmentary structures met, there were seen horned heads on human bodies, bodies of oxen with human heads, and figures of intersexuality. But most of these products of natural forces disappeared as suddenly as they arose; only in those rare cases where the parts were found to be adapted to each other did the complex structures last. Thus the organic universe sprang from spontaneous aggregations that suited each other as if this had been intended. Soon various influences reduced creatures of double sex to a male and a female, and the world was replenished with organic life.
Empedocles was a vegetarianism 136 - 139 and advocated vegetarianism, since the bodies of animals are also dwelling places of punished souls. For Empedocles, all living things were on the same spiritual plane; plants and animals are links in a chain where humans are a link too.
Empedocles is credited with the first comprehensive theory of light and vision. Historian Will Durant noted that "Empedocles suggested that light takes time to pass from one point to another."Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization, Volume 2: The Life of Greece (New York; Simon & Schuster) 1939, p. 339. Empedocles (and with him all others who used the same forms of expression) was wrong in speaking of light as 'travelling' or being at a given moment between the earth and its envelope, its movement being unobservable by us; that view is contrary both to the clear evidence of argument and to the observed facts; if the distance traversed were short, the movement might have been unobservable, but where the distance is from extreme East to extreme West, the draught upon our powers of belief is too great. Aristotle, On the soul 418b He put forward the idea that we see objects because light streams out of our eyes and touches them. While flawed, this became the fundamental basis on which later Greek philosophers and mathematicians like Euclid would construct some of the most important theories of light, vision, and optics. Let There be Light 7 August 2006 01:50 BBC Four
Knowledge is explained by the principle that elements in the things outside us are perceived by the corresponding elements in ourselves. Like is known by like. The whole body is full of Sweat gland and hence respiration takes place over the whole frame. In the organs of sense these pores are specially adapted to receive the effluences which are continually rising from bodies around us; thus perception occurs. In vision, certain particles go forth from the eye to meet similar particles given forth from the object, and the resultant contact constitutes vision. Perception is not merely a passive reflection of external objects.
Empedocles also attempted to explain the phenomenon of respiration by means of an elaborate analogy with the Water clock, an ancient device for conveying liquids from one vessel to another. This fragment has sometimes been connected to a passage in Aristotle's Physics where Aristotle refers to people who twisted wineskins and captured air in clepsydras to demonstrate that Vacuum does not exist. The fragment certainly implies that Empedocles knew about the Matter of air, but he says nothing whatever about the void, and there is no evidence that Empedocles performed any experiment with clepsydras.
In old editions of Empedocles, about 450 lines were ascribed to "On Nature" which outlined his philosophical system, and explains not only the nature and history of the universe, including his theory of the four classical elements, but also theories on causation, perception, and thought, as well as explanations of terrestrial phenomena and biological processes. The other 100 lines were typically ascribed to his "Purifications", which was taken to be a poem about ritual purification, or the poem that contained all his religious and ethical thought, which early editors supposed that it was a poem that offered a mythical account of the world which may, nevertheless, have been part of Empedocles' philosophical system.
A late 20th century discovery has changed this situation. The Strasbourg papyrus contains a large section of "On Nature", including many lines formerly attributed to "On Purifications". This has raised considerable debate about whether the surviving fragments of his teaching should be attributed to two separate poems, with different subject matter; whether they may all derive from one poem with two titles; or whether one title refers to part of the whole poem.
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