From the book
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordHistoria means inquiry or investigation, not necessarily a written history.
- In this workIn On Ancient Medicine the author attacks physicians and sophists who say medical knowledge requires first knowing what a human being is, how humans originated, and from what they were compounded.
- In this editionThe title “Hippocrates” identifies the transmitted corpus attribution, not secure personal authorship.
- A place to readNames Empedocles in a critique of making cosmogonic knowledge foundational for medicine.
Meaning
Historia means inquiry or investigation, not necessarily a written history. Peri physeōs names inquiry about nature. The Hippocratic text uses Ionic forms such as physios and philosophiē, reminders that the surviving language belongs to its author and polemical setting.
Use in the book
In On Ancient Medicine the author attacks physicians and sophists who say medical knowledge requires first knowing what a human being is, how humans originated, and from what they were compounded. Empedocles is named as an exemplar of this movement into philosophy. The author reverses its proposed direction of explanation: clear knowledge of nature is to be gained from medicine, rather than practical medicine being founded on a speculative origin story. This is not a rejection of all investigation into nature. Plato's Phaedo offers a distinct retrospective scene, where Socrates recalls youthful fascination with the causes of coming-to-be, perishing, and being, then lists candidate physical explanations. Empedocles is not named there; the attribution of particular alternatives to him is editorial and traditional. Together the passages reveal arguments about what kind of knowledge bodily explanation requires, without proving that Empedocles himself articulated the precise methodological programme his critics attack.
Places to read
- A 71 (polemical)Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine. Names Empedocles in a critique of making cosmogonic knowledge foundational for medicine.
- A 76 (reception)Plato, Phaedo. Dramatizes Socrates' former fascination with natural causes without naming Empedocles.
Translation in this edition
The title “Hippocrates” identifies the transmitted corpus attribution, not secure personal authorship. Claims that A71 is certainly the earliest surviving criticism or that its date falls within Empedocles' lifetime require qualification beyond these excerpts.
Source note
The comparison in On Ancient Medicine that natural speculation belongs less to medicine than to painting is textually disputed: the apparatus records Ehlert's deletion of the painting phrase. The methodological reversal does not depend on accepting it.