Parmenides and Empedocles

Parmenides and Empedocles
Author: Parmenides,
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1725229609

Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus the most important of the pre-Socratic philosophers, were at the same time among the greatest poets of the ancient world. But their work is rarely treated and still more rarely translated in its original form--as poetry. The complete extant fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles are collected here for the first time in a translation responsive to the original verse texts. Parmenides' philosophical fragments are here given as the poetic remains of the thinker from Elea in Southern Italy whom Socrates wondered at and Plato held in awe. What emerges from the poetry is at once an uncompromising vision of absolute Being and a compassionate understanding of the human cosmos: It is the body grows to Mind. All men desire the same thing, apprehend the same The plenum is thought, and thought preponderates. The poetry of Empedocles--reincarnationist, naturalist, cosmologist, religious leader, physiologist, and a metaphysician--is presented here in the personal idiom of the fifth-century Sicilian who has been called the last of the Greek shamans: I have already been A bush and a bird A boy and a girl A mute fish in the sea.

Form Without Matter

Form Without Matter
Author: Mark Eli Kalderon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2015
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198717903

Mark Eli Kalderon presents an original study in the philosophy of perception written in the medium of historiography. He considers the phenomenology and metaphysics of sensory presentation through the examination of an ancient aporia. Specifically, he argues that a puzzle about perception at a distance is behind Empedocles' theory of vision. Empedocles conceives of perception as a mode of material assimilation, but this raises a puzzle about color vision, since color vision seems to present colors that inhere in distant objects. But if the colors inhere in distant objects how can they be taken in by the organ of sight and so be palpable to sense? Aristotle purports to resolve this puzzle in his definition of perception as the assimilation of sensible form without the matter of the perceived particular. Aristotle explicitly criticizes Empedocles, though he is keen to retain the idea that perception is a mode of assimilation, if not a material mode. Aristotle's notorious definition has long puzzled commentators. Kalderon shows how, read in light of Empedoclean puzzlement about the sensory presentation of remote objects, Aristotle's definition of perception can be better understood. Moreover, when so read, the resulting conception of perception is both attractive and defensible.

The Death of Empedocles

The Death of Empedocles
Author: Friedrich Holderlin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2008-07-06
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0791477339

The definitive scholarly edition and new translation of all three versions of Hölderlin’s poem, The Death of Empedocles, and his related theoretical essays.

Empedocles Redivivus

Empedocles Redivivus
Author: Myrto Garani
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2007-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135859833

This book consists of a thorough study of Lucretius’ poetic and philosophical debt to Empedocles, focusing on their respective uses of analogy and examining how both poets turn these poetic techniques to use in their epistemological approaches to nature.

Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic

Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic
Author: Peter Kingsley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 440
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

More specifically, he traces for the first time a line of transmission from Empedocles and the early Pythagoreans down to southern Egypt, and from there into the world of Islam. "Highly polemical new book ... The thesis is argued with immense learning." "Times Higher Education Supplement".

Reconstructing Empedocles' Thought

Reconstructing Empedocles' Thought
Author: Chiara Ferella
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2024-01-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1009392581

To understand Empedocles' thought, one must view his work as a unified whole of religion and physics. Only a few interpreters, however, recognise rebirth as a positive doctrine within Empedocles' physics and attempt to reconcile its details with the cosmological account. This study shows how rebirth underlies Empedocles' cosmic system, being a structuring principle of his physics. It reconstructs the proem to his physical poem and then shows that claims to disembodied existence, individual identity and personal survival of death(s) prove central to his physics; that knowledge of the cosmos is the path to escape rebirth; that purifications are essential to comprehending the world and changing one's being, and that the cosmic cycle, with its ethical import, is the ideal backdrop for Empedocles' doctrine of rebirth. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Empedocles of Acragas

Empedocles of Acragas
Author: Nicos I. Georgakellos
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2019-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527528510

Empedocles of Acragas is known as philosopher, healer, excellent orator, miracle-maker, and engineer. This book shows that the careful study of extant fragments of his writings confirms that he was a multi-faceted thinker. In a period when most thinkers were monists, he was a pluralist and the first to introduce the principle of the four elements (roots, as he has named them), as well as the two motive factors (Love and Strife) closely dependent on one another. Scholars, students and specialists will find in this book a guide to new and unexplored paths of Empedocles’ revolutionary thought.

Fragments of Empedocles

Fragments of Empedocles
Author: Empedocles
Publisher:
Total Pages: 38
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781981102068

Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Acragas (Agrigentum), a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for originating the cosmogenic theory of the four classical elements. He also proposed forces he called Love and Strife which would mix as well as separate the elements. These physical speculations were part of a history of the universe which also dealt with the origin and development of life. Influenced by the Pythagoreans, Empedocles was a vegetarian who supported the 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.

Death by Philosophy

Death by Philosophy
Author: Ava Chitwood
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780472113880

Brings to vivid life the connections between philosophy and biography by examining the spectacular--and often wildly implausible--biographies of famous pre-Socratic thinkers