Pore and passage

Use in the book

The report concerning Empedocles explains color through the fitting of what is seen to the pores of sight. It also connects a fourfold classification of colors with the four elements. The explanatory role of the pores is selective admission or fitting, not merely the presence of empty holes.

Places to read

1. I.16.1.3Color is related to the pores of sight in the Empedoclean account.

Translation in this edition

“Pores” retains the established vocabulary of this theory; “passages” makes the underlying image clearer.

Use in the book

B1002 gives the richest concrete evidence. Pipes of flesh terminate near the bodily exterior, and perforations allow aither a route while blood is retained. Within the vessel comparison, a controllable passage permits or prevents the exchange of air and water. The important property is functional access: whether a given material has a way through under the conditions described.

B842 presents selective transmission in the eye. Fine tissues are pierced with channels that hold water back and let finer fire pass outward. The two examples show that a passage is intelligible through the relation between its structure and the material moving through it. An opening is not explanatory merely because it exists; its ability to admit some things and exclude others matters.

The introduction generalizes this relation into the perceptual doctrine of effluences fitting the passages of an organ. That summary is broader than any single quoted line. The reader should distinguish its systematic formulation from the particular pipes and membranes directly described in B842 and B1002.

B32 gives the vocabulary an epistemic reach: wherever there is a passage for understanding, trust is not to be withheld from the relevant bodily faculty. The image is bodily and cognitive at once. It does not mean that intellectual understanding can be mapped onto a set of modern microscopic pores, nor that all ways of knowing must have the identical anatomy. Passage is a flexible but concrete explanatory relation between a source, a route, and an activity.

Places to read

1. B 100.1–5Bodily ducts provide a route for aither while retaining blood.
2. B 100.9–21The vessel’s passage can be stopped by a hand and released.
3. B 84.7–11Pierced tissues discriminate between surrounding water and outward fire.
4. B 3.9–13A passage for understanding accompanies the injunction to use each bodily faculty.
5. Introduction VI (editorial discussion)The translator explains the choice of passages or channels over pores.

Translation in this edition

“Pores” remains a useful lookup term for scholarship, but using it throughout would prematurely narrow the imagery to skin. The source has a family of related route-words whose local physical functions deserve separate attention.

Use in the book

Aristotle at A872 explains a general pore account of acting and being acted upon, including sight, hearing and other perceptions. Transparent materials have passages too small to see, close-packed and aligned. He then explicitly associates Empedocles with mixing when the pores of ingredients are commensurate. This links the material theory of mixture to sensory fitting without making every sentence in the introductory collective account a uniquely Empedoclean claim.

The critical difficulty is whether passages are empty. Philoponus first argues that a body cannot be continuous passage throughout, since it would then be entirely void. He concludes that touching solid indivisible parts must be separated by empty spaces, which he calls Empedocles’ pores. Yet other passages attributed to Philoponus insist that pore-theorists did not posit empty passages: they filled them with finer material, such as air, and thus differed from void-theorists. The first is an inference about what the theory must imply, the second a distinction of stated commitments.

Theophrastus at A86 §§12–13 had already pressed a related dilemma. Empty pores contradict the denial of void, while full pores threaten constant perception if fitting like material is sufficient. The continuation asks where unlike material filling a passage withdraws when perception occurs. These are criticisms, not a report that Empedocles explicitly accepted either horn.

Pseudo-Philoponus finally describes passages and solid parts in sublunary bodies, using hollows and close-packed parts. This is a different attributed commentator, not simply the same author resolving his earlier statements. The dossier shows how the pore model could be reconstructed, criticized and defended in different ways; it does not authorize silently converting it into atomism.

Places to read

1. A 87 (testimony)2Aristotle, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away. Links pores to perception, transparency and, explicitly for Empedocles, commensurate mixing.
2. A 87 (polemical)2Philoponus, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away. First infers void and indivisible solids, but other excerpts distinguish pores filled with finer bodies from void.
3. A 87 (testimony)2Pseudo-Philoponus, On the Generation of Animals. Calls passages hollows and solid parts close-packed in sublunary bodies.
4. A 86 §§ 12–13 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 13. Presents the empty-or-full dilemma against the sensory account.
5. A 86 §§ 14–15 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 14. Asks where material already filling the passages goes when perception occurs.

Translation in this edition

The final A872 notice is Pseudo-Philoponus, not Philoponus proper. Its reference to On Coming-to-be and Passing-away points to the Aristotelian discussion; it must not be turned into the title of a lost Empedoclean book.