EMPEDOCLES

Empedocles was a Greek philosopher born of an aristocratic family in the Dorian city-state of Akragas on the southern coast of Sicily. The exact dates of his lifetime are a matter of conjecture. It has been argued that he was born c. 521 b.c. and died c. 461 b.c., but he is usually said to have flourished c. 444 b.c. There is little reliable information about his life, but we know that he was banished from his native city. Although Diogenes Laertius reports that he ended his life by leaping into the crater of Mt. Etna, the historian Timaeus tells us that he left Sicily for the Peloponnesus and that the manner of his death is unknown. He was actively engaged in politics, religion, and medicine, and his name was surrounded with an aura of mystic wisdom. He wrote in verse and fairly extensive fragments of two of his poems, one on nature (Περὶφύσεως), the other on purifications (Καθαρμοί), are extant.

Theory of the Elements. Empedocles's cosmological theory was developed as a response to the Parmenidean insistence on the immutability of being. He agreed with parmenides that whatever exists cannot have come into being nor can it go out of being; yet change is a fact that must be explained. Empedocles's solution rested on a denial of Parmenidean monism. He held that whatever exists is reducible to four basic elements or "roots": earth, air, fire, and water. Each minimal unit of these four roots is immutable in its being, and change is the aggregation of these roots into the familiar objects of experience and their subsequent dissolution. In this way Empedocles felt that he could agree with Parmenides that being is immutable and also find room for change in the world of experience.

Furthermore he looked upon the four roots as passive, requiring the imposition of an external force to bring about the combinations and dissolutions of the world of change. Hence he posited the force of love, which is attractive, and the force of hate, which is separative. According to Aristotle (Meta. 1075b 1–7), Empedocles assigns to love the dual role of being a material and an efficient cause, since, despite the metaphorical implications of these terms, love and hate were postulated as material forces. Hence Empedoclean cosmology was thoroughly materialistic.

Empedocles envisioned the history of the universe as an eternally recurring cyclic process involving the following four stages: (1) love predominates, and all the elements are thoroughly mixed together; (2) hate progressively expresses itself, and the elements begin to separate out into distinguishable objects; (3) hate predominates, and the four elements are completely separated from each other; and (4) love progressively reasserts itself, and the elements begin to combine into distinguishable objects. This theory of cosmic process enabled him to develop an evolutionary theory of life.

Psychology. He taught the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, a view also found in the Pythagorean school and in the Dialogues of Plato. Yet it is not clear how the implication of personal immortality can be made consistent with his doctrine of the cyclic aggregation and separation of the elements. His explanation of perception is, however, a direct consequence of the materialistic commitments of his cosmology. According to Aristotle (Anim. 427a 22), Empedocles made no distinction between thought and sense perception. Rather all knowledge is the result of material effluences given off by external objects entering into the pores of the sensory organs. If these effluences are neither too small nor too large in relation to the pores of the sensory organs, then they properly enter into the organs and produce sensation. Empedocles saw that a purely mechanistic theory of knowledge and consciousness is demanded by his materialistic cosmology, and he did not shrink from drawing the consequences.

See Also: greek philosophy; materialism; mechanism.

Bibliography: For the extant fragments, see h. diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Griechisch und Deutsch, (10 ed. Berlin 1960–61). English. k. freeman, tr., Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, Mass. 1957). empedocles, The Fragments of Empedocles, tr. w. e. leonard (Chicago 1908). Secondary studies. f. c. copleston, History of Philosophy (Westminster, Md. 1946) 1:61–65. j. burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (4th ed. London 1930). w. kranz, Empedokles (Zurich 1949). e. bignone, Empedocle (Turin 1916). h. long, "The Unity of Empedocles' Thought," American Journal of Philology 70 (1949) 142–158.

[r. j. blackwell]