John Palmer

Elemental Change in Empedocles

Abstract This essay argues that Empedocles envisaged the elemental “roots” fire, water, earth, and air as having their own life cycles and undergoing their own transformations like virtually everything else in his system except Love and Strife. Empedocles conceives of the elements’ destruction and generation in terms of their losing and recovering their distinctive qualitative identities as they intermingle through Love’s agency and grow apart through Strife’s. This result makes it possible to understand the crucial verses Physika I.234–36 as Empedocles’ general description of the dual processes involved in the generation and destruction of all specimen compounds.

Parmenides of Elea

Parmenides (ca. 515–after 450 bce) of Elea in Campania composed a philosophical poem in epic hexameter on metaphysical and cosmological themes, cast in the form of a revelation imparted to him by a goddess after he journeyed to her abode in the underworld. Parmenides reports how she revealed to him the unchanging nature of true reality and, in a second stage, the natural worlds principles and origins. While the significance of the first part of this revelation and the relation between its two stages has proved intensely controversial, there is nevertheless consensus on the view that Parmenides was the most profound of the early Greek philosophers. Keywords: 500–250 bce ; ancient Greek; history of philosophy; philosophy