Hearing

Use in the book

Empedocles’ report compares the cartilage inside the ear to a suspended bell struck by a current of air. The notice assigned to Plato’s followers instead describes air in the head being struck and reflected toward the governing parts. Both use a blow and transmission, but they identify different structures and explanatory stages. The Timaeus excerpt explicitly asks for the causes of the affections involved in hearing.

Places to read

1. I.53.1Cartilage is compared to a swinging bell.
2. I.53.4Struck air transmits the effect to governing parts.
3. I.53.5.1Auditory experience is treated as an affection requiring causes.

Translation in this edition

“Hearing” names the faculty or experience; “sound” and “voice” name what is heard in their respective contexts.

Use in the book

B32 is chiefly an instruction about the use of faculties. It refuses to rank sight above hearing automatically, and likewise refuses to let hearing override the clear evidence of the tongue. The acoustic epithet is vivid, but the passage does not itself explain the ear’s mechanism.

For that mechanism, B99 must be read with its transmission setting. Theophrastus says that sounds arise within the ear and compares the ear to a bell ringing with corresponding echoes; he also reports the expression “fleshy sprig.” The edition prints those small lexical items and explains his surrounding prose. The resulting evidence is a mixture of attributed wording and reporting, not a lost two-word hexameter that explains the whole process unaided.

The bell-image makes resonance or ringing accessible through an artifact; the sprig-image identifies an organic structure through growth. Together they suggest that an account of hearing needs both a bodily part and the way sound behaves within it. They do not specify a modern eardrum, ossicle system, or cochlea. Assigning the fleshy sprig to one of those structures would require evidence not given in the book.

The entry therefore distinguishes an epistemic role for hearing from its reported physiology. Both belong to Empedocles' attention to the body’s means of apprehension, but neither can replace the other.

Places to read

1. B 3.9–13Hearing is compared with sight and the tongue’s evidence.
2. B 99 (report)The isolated bell and fleshy-sprig expressions are printed from Theophrastus.
3. B 99 (editorial discussion)The note summarizes his account of inner sounds and bell-like echoes.

Translation in this edition

The punctuation joining bell and fleshy sprig is editorial presentation of fragments from a report. The words are not evidence for a single continuous Empedoclean phrase “bell-fleshy-sprig.”

Use in the book

The report makes hearing arise from internal sounds. Voice sets air moving; that air rings within, and movement beats air against solid parts, producing sound. Aëtius's shorter notice describes breath striking a suspended cartilaginous part inside the ear, which swings like a bell. Both accounts explain an internal event occasioned by something outside, although their anatomical descriptions are not identical.

Theophrastus's criticism isolates what remains unexplained: if we hear external things by the internal bell, by what do we hear the bell itself? The objection is not simply that no sound occurs. It asks why causing an internal sound amounts to perception rather than merely relocating the object to be heard. This is a distinction between an account of the physical stimulus and an account of its being perceived. It should not be expanded into a doctrine of a little listener inside the ear, which the witness does not propose.

Places to read

1. A 86 § 9 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 9. Reports hearing as internal resonance produced by moving air.
2. A 86 §§ 20–21 (polemical)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 21. Asks what hears the internally sounding bell.
3. A 93 (testimony)Aëtius. Describes impact on a suspended cartilaginous structure.

Translation in this edition

The internal/external wording in §9 is textually corrected: Karsten prints ἔσωθεν where manuscripts have ἔξωθεν. The later objection supports the adopted internal-sound reading, but the correction deserves notice.