From the book
Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II
Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordΤάξις is order or arrangement and ἀταξία its absence or disruption.
- In this workAristotle’s A39 begins from an observation he presents as motivating a second principle: nature contains not only order and beauty but their opposites, allegedly with bad things more numerous than good.
- In this editionThe claim that evils outnumber goods is part of Aristotle’s argumentative setting.
- A place to readUses the presence of disorder and ugliness in nature to motivate the two-cause reconstruction.
Meaning
Τάξις is order or arrangement and ἀταξία its absence or disruption. Aristotle pairs them with beauty and ugliness or the fair and the shameful. The pairing shows that his account moves between arrangement and evaluation, rather than treating every term as a purely geometrical property.
Use in the book
Aristotle’s A39 begins from an observation he presents as motivating a second principle: nature contains not only order and beauty but their opposites, allegedly with bad things more numerous than good. He then introduces Love and Strife as the respective causes. This explanatory narrative is Aristotle’s account of why an earlier thinker adopted two causes; it is not a historical anecdote in which Empedocles tells a listener his reasoning.
The passage is especially useful for distinguishing cosmos-language from moralized order. A cosmos may be an ordered world produced during Strife’s dominance in Simplicius’ A52, even though Aristotle’s A39 aligns Strife with disorder. The two texts do not become consistent merely by translating cosmos as order; they speak from different interpretative perspectives.
The entry therefore records a causal vocabulary of opposed conditions and values while resisting an automatic equation of every instance of orderly structure with Love alone.
Places to read
- A 39 (polemical)Aristotle, Metaphysics A 4, 984b32. Uses the presence of disorder and ugliness in nature to motivate the two-cause reconstruction.
- A 52 (testimony)Simplicius, De caelo 293,18. Describes a cosmos of Strife, complicating a one-to-one moral equation of order with Love.
Translation in this edition
The claim that evils outnumber goods is part of Aristotle’s argumentative setting. It is not a quantified observation or a securely quoted Empedoclean doctrine.