Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

Pseudo-Philoponus, On the Generation of Animals

Empedocles said that in all bodies below the moon — waters, oils and the rest — there are passages and solid parts mixed together, as he also said in On Coming-to-be and Passing-away; and he called the passages "hollows" and the solid parts "close-packed."

Report, with three later commentators arguing over what a passage is.

Here the same commentator argues against himself across three passages of one book, and the disagreement is worth more than a verdict would be. Philoponus first reasons that Empedocles must, whether he likes it or not, have committed himself to void and to indivisible solids — which would make him an atomist in spite of himself. Then, twice, he insists that the men who posited passages expressly denied the void and took the passages to be full of finer stuff. The second is almost certainly right, and A 86 § 13 shows Theophrastus pressing exactly the same difficulty seven centuries earlier.

Bearing on Volume I. The pore doctrine underlying the whole of A 86, stated here in its own terms.

4 φησιν in L: φασιν in the other manuscripts.

Images in a mirror

Aëtius

Empedocles [explains reflections] by effluences, which gather on the surface of the mirror and are compacted by the fiery stuff given off from the mirror — which also carries along with it the air lying in front, into which the streams travel.

Doxographic report, one sentence, and technical.

A reflection, on this account, is a physical deposit: the effluences of the object arrive at the glass and are pressed into a film there by fire coming the other way. Nothing is at any point immaterial, and nothing travels instantaneously.

19 πιλουμένας is the reading of Stobaeus; the ps.-Plutarch branch has the false τελειουμένας.