From the book
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordEnantios means opposite or contrary; anomoios means unlike.
- In this workThe opening classification associates perception by opposition with Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, rather than Empedocles.
- In this editionEnglish “opposite” sometimes translates a relational contrast and sometimes names an elemental counterpart.
- A place to readAssigns perception by the opposite to rival thinkers.
Meaning
Enantios means opposite or contrary; anomoios means unlike. Although the dossier often places these expressions on the same side of a contrast with likeness, they are not lexical equivalents. “The opposite” may also stand for the water opposed to fire in an optical description.
Use in the book
The opening classification associates perception by opposition with Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, rather than Empedocles. Yet opposition remains active within the account assigned to Empedocles: pain results from opposites, ignorance from unlikes, and a contrary restores an eye whose elemental balance is disturbed. An explanatory appeal to opposition is therefore not confined to membership in Theophrastus's initial school division.
At §19 Theophrastus suggests that senses judge by opposites because they should approach their objects unaffected. This is his counterproposal, qualified by “rather, one might say,” not a further Empedoclean doctrine. At §23 he uses the parallel association of unlike with ignorance and pain to charge the system with an unwanted identification. The objection depends on treating shared causation as insufficiently differentiated; readers should not turn it into Empedocles' explicit statement that ignorance is painful.
Places to read
- A 86 §§ 1–2 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 1. Assigns perception by the opposite to rival thinkers.
- A 86 §§ 7–8 (testimony)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 8. Says that the contrary is the cure for each imbalance of the eye.
- A 86 §§ 18–19 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 19. Tentatively opposes sensory neutrality to like-by-like.
- A 86 §§ 22–23 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 23. Connects the accounts of ignorance and pain through unlikes.
Translation in this edition
English “opposite” sometimes translates a relational contrast and sometimes names an elemental counterpart. In §8 the text is also supplemented, so apparent systematic neatness exceeds the unproblematic manuscript evidence.