Empedocles, Volume II
One hundred reviewed questions organized around the witnesses, life, poetic authority, roots, cosmic powers, natural explanation, perception, thought, purification, and reception.
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Questions for discussion
Evidence, witnesses & the life10 questions+
Whose words? What distinguishes a quotation from a report about a doctrine? In A 57, separate the position attributed to Empedocles, Aristotle’s objection, and the editor’s assessment. Which can establish what Empedocles actually said?→ The missing whole. How should the loss of most of the poems affect a claim that Empedocles never discussed something? Distinguish absence from the surviving evidence from evidence that a doctrine was absent.→ A long transmission. What survives the journey that produces the name “Abrucalis”? Does agreement about some teachings establish the reliability of every claim in that notice, or must each claim be examined separately?→ Distance and weight. Why might an extended objection preserve more than a short summary? What advantages and risks does the Introduction associate with Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Aëtius? Formulate a rule for weighing, not merely counting, witnesses.→ Vocabulary as interpretation. What changes when “roots” become “elements,” or a report introduces “the governing part”? How could a helpful restatement also make Empedocles appear to answer questions framed by later thinkers?→ A chronological argument. How does Apollodorus distinguish the two people named Empedocles? Identify the premises of his argument, then explain why the chronological notices elsewhere cannot simply be averaged into a reliable date.→ Teacher or influence? What different relationships are implied by pupil, associate, emulator, and imitator? Which claims about Empedocles’ teachers are reported, which are contested, and which depend on a document the compiler distrusts?→ A wonder takes shape. Compare the hides, the wall, and the bare title of Wind-stopper. What changes as practical detail disappears? Does a more ordinary explanation automatically make a report more trustworthy?→ The end of an inquiry. In the disappearance narrative, what was reportedly observed, and what did Pausanias conclude? What would justify the move from an absent person to a divine status, and who stops further questioning?→ Knowing when to stop. What do the competing accounts of death allow a reader to conclude? Does rejecting the crater story establish a particular alternative, or can responsible inquiry end with a more limited statement?→
Poetry, healing & authority10 questions+
A sacrifice without killing. What is preserved, and what is changed, when an ox made of honey and barley-meal or spices replaces a living victim? Does the reported act reject sacrifice itself or reinterpret what a sacrifice should be?→ Who may receive a teaching? What is at stake in the accusation that Empedocles made restricted discourses public through poetry? Compare the reported prohibition with the public recitation at Olympia. Does the manner of transmission change a teaching’s authority?→ Physician and seer. What connects the healing stories to the titles physician and seer? Compare these narratives with Galen’s placement of Empedocles among medical traditions. Would practical success establish the wider powers claimed for him?→ Two portraits of one person. Timaeus contrasts the figure in the poetry with the figure in civic life. What makes him see an inconsistency? Does the editor’s alternative interpretation remove the difficulty, or depend on a further assumption about spiritual achievement?→ Rhetoric and truth. What might it mean to “set rhetoric in motion”: inventing techniques, teaching an art, or changing how audiences respond? How far do the notices support a direct line from Empedocles to Gorgias rather than a tidy genealogy?→ The lyre and the pupil. What conception of teaching is embodied in the story of anger interrupted by music? How does the editorial correction concerning Anchitos and Pausanias alter the story, and how certain can that identification be?→ What makes a poet? Why does Aristotle distinguish Empedocles from Homer despite their shared metre? Does Menander’s category of the natural hymn challenge Aristotle’s criterion, or classify the same writing according to an entirely different purpose?→ Persuasion without clarity. Why does Aristotle compare the response to ambiguous poetry with the response to soothsayers? Can a style be powerful without explaining its subject? Consider whether the literary praise in A 26 answers this objection at all.→ When a metaphor explains. What would have to be added to “the sweat of the earth” to make it an explanation of the sea? Do the reports in A 66 supply a mechanism, or merely extend the same image?→ Recognising wisdom. Examine the saying that one must be wise to recognise a wise person. Does it trap a beginner outside philosophy, or distinguish recognition from learning? How does the doubtful attribution change its use as evidence about Empedocles?→
Roots, mixture & divine names10 questions+
Four or six principles? Why does the report count four constituents but six principles? Is a source of motion a principle in the same sense as something moved? What does the note warn us not to attribute directly to the surviving verse?→ A reduction to two. On what grounds does Aristotle reduce the four to fire and its opposites? Does this describe a functional contrast within a four-root account, or show that the account does not genuinely need four independent constituents?→ What really changes? If coming-to-be and perishing are combination and separation, what becomes of the distinction between a new thing and rearranged old things? Does the persistence of the constituents settle the reality of a compound’s birth or death?→ A place for every root? How does the denial of permanently fixed places affect an explanation of cosmic order? Compare it with the reported sequence of separation. Must an ordered world assign an unchangeable location to each constituent?→ Conflicting divine identities. Set out the competing assignments of Hera and Aidoneus. What could decide between them: the names’ meanings, the witnesses’ access to the poem, or their apparent agreement? Why would a simple count of witnesses be insufficient?→ A reason is not a quotation. Hippolytus explains Aidoneus through invisibility and Nestis through nourishment and fasting. Do these arguments establish the poet’s intention, or show how a later reader makes the names intelligible? What remains uncertain in the note?→ Blending or juxtaposition? Compare Galen’s powdered substances with Aristotle’s wall of bricks and stones. What would make a mixture more than parts touching? Can the original constituents remain unchanged while the compound has properties none of them has separately?→ Can a heap have a ratio? Does defining bone by a fixed ratio answer the charge that mixture is only juxtaposition? Could an organised heap also have a ratio? Examine the Introduction’s argument rather than treating its conclusion as already established.→ Qualities in the Sphairos. Philoponus reports that the roots lose their distinctive qualities in the Sphairos. Is losing a perceptible distinction the same as ceasing to be the same root? Which interpretation produces the contradiction he alleges?→ Divine parts, divine whole. What can it mean to call both the roots and their unified whole gods? Does the whole depend on the parts in the same sense in which the parts depend on the powers that join them?→
Love, Strife, Necessity & the cycle10 questions+
Can Love divide? Reconstruct Aristotle’s claim that Love divides and Strife combines. Does the objection change force when we specify whether like parts, unlike roots, or whole compounds are being joined? What would count as a genuine inconsistency?→ Unity as destruction. Why can Love’s unification also be described as the destruction of a cosmos? Distinguish the loss of an ordered arrangement from the disappearance of its constituents. What does this do to the assumption that joining always preserves things?→ Are the powers moral principles? How does Aristotle move from Love causing good things to Love being the good? Is that inference secure? Test his moral interpretation against the reported ability of Love to destroy an existing cosmic arrangement.→ What governs the powers? Does Necessity stand over Love and Strife, or name their combined operation? Compare Aëtius and Plutarch. What would each reading change about whether the powers act freely, obey a rule, or constitute the rule themselves?→ An inferred interval of rest. What weight should we give Aristotle’s phrase “it seems that Empedocles too would say”? Is the interval of rest something reported from a text, or something Aristotle thinks the account requires? Could the inference be rejected?→ One formation or two? Read the two Aristotle notices within A 42 together. How can an omitted world-formation under Love coexist with a former cosmos resembling the present one? What assumptions are required by each possible reconciliation?→ History or exposition? Simplicius suggests that a sequence can be presented for teaching rather than as events in time. What becomes of the cycle under that reading? Compare the suggestion with Aristotle’s contrast between repeated separation and a single occurrence.→ What returns? When the cosmos comes to be and perishes repeatedly, what exactly repeats: the constituents, the structure, or the same individual beings? Which of these claims does the testimony actually warrant, and which would require further evidence?→ What is imperishable? Aristotle says that all things except the elements perish. How does that statement sit beside the divine Sphairos and the moving powers? Does it describe the whole system adequately, or leave the status of some principles unclear?→ Your provisional cycle. Give the most defensible account of the cycle in three sentences. Identify which witness supports each sentence, then name the strongest incompatible report. What must remain undecided rather than being quietly fitted into your reconstruction?→
The heavens, light & the earth10 questions+
The cosmos and the All. What difference is introduced by making the cosmos only part of the All? Could the boundary traced by the sun’s circuit be the boundary of an arrangement rather than of everything that exists? How secure is this reconstruction?→ Separation without creation. Reconstruct the order of separation in the cosmogonic reports. When water emerges from earth and air from water, is the account describing extraction, transformation, or something the wording leaves unclear? Compare this with the permanence of the roots.→ How crystalline is agreement? What do the witnesses mean by a crystalline heaven: solidity, frozen air, compacted water, or an analogy? Does the editorial description of the reports as “in agreement” adequately capture the differences in their actual wording?→ The apparent sun. In the report of two suns, what distinguishes the archetypal fire from the visible reflection? Which relations are intelligible, and which remain unclear? Can “archetypal” be explained from this notice without importing another philosophical system?→ Too swift to notice. What is Aristotle’s objection to light taking time to travel, and how does Philoponus answer it? Distinguish failure to observe an interval from proof that no interval exists. What evidence would discriminate between their accounts?→ Borrowed light, borrowed conclusions. Does the statement that the moon has borrowed light support the further claim that it broke off from the sun? Compare the quotation used in A 55 with the distinct reports of its composition, shape, and illumination.→ A number without a relation. Explain how the two versions of the moon’s distance place the same number in incompatible relationships. Does Diels’s proposed correction recover a secure statement, or offer a conjecture? What should a reader retain from the entry?→ One event, several effects. How do the reports connect fire, air, motion, lightning, thunder, and seasonal change? Choose one explanation and distinguish the proposed cause from the phenomenon it explains. Where does compression of the report obstruct the reasoning?→ The swinging ladle. What does the analogy of water in a revolving ladle explain about the earth’s remaining in place? Which feature is carried over from the familiar case, and which difference between ladle and cosmos most needs justification?→ The earth as an apparatus. How does Seneca’s water-heater make an underground process intelligible? Distinguish his illustrative appliance from the doctrine attributed to Empedocles. Compare the role of hidden fire here with the explanations of stone and rock.→
Life, generation & the organism10 questions+
Plants as parts of earth. What does the comparison between plants in earth and embryos in a womb explain? Does it make earth a living parent, or establish only a relation of dependence? Which reading stays closest to the notice’s actual claims?→ One plant, opposed motions. Why do Aristotle and Theophrastus object to explaining roots and shoots through different elemental tendencies? What must be explained about a single organism that is not explained merely by accounting for movement in two directions?→ Do plants perceive? Set Plutarch’s “without sensation” beside Nicolaus’s report of desire, sensation, and understanding. Are the statements necessarily incompatible, or do they concern different processes? What would justify resolving the tension rather than simply recording it?→ Four kinds of generation. Reconstruct Aëtius’s four-stage sequence without filling its gaps. What changes between separated parts, joined forms, whole-natured beings, and reproduction through one another? Does naming these stages explain why one gives way to the next?→ Affinity or compensation? Compare the animals directed toward habitats by their mixtures with the hottest animals seeking water. Is a creature drawn to what resembles it or to what corrects it? Can both explanations belong to one account without becoming unrestricted?→ The first breath. Why distinguish the first breath of the first living thing from the breathing that now occurs? Reconstruct the respective roles of moisture, heat, blood, and incoming air. Does the water-clock analogy explain the origin of motion or its exchange?→ Bodily time and cosmic time. What connection does A 75 propose between changing day-length and gestation? Compare it with the developmental timings in A 83. How much of the connection can be understood before the damaged wording forces us to suspend judgement?→ Where does differentiation begin? Compare Aristotle’s report about the womb with Censorinus’s account of the parents’ seeds. Are they locating the same cause at the same stage? What would be required to combine them into one explanation of sex and resemblance?→ An explanation too general. Why does Aristotle object to an account that applies alike to all mating outside a kind? Contrast that objection with Aëtius’s anatomical account of the mule. What makes an explanation specific enough to explain the case in question?→ What holds a body together? Compare nourishment, the differing tissues, the umbilical vessels, and the heart’s reported priority. Which notices explain material supply, which explain composition, and which explain organisation? Can one of these kinds of explanation replace the others?→
Perception: passages & effluences10 questions+
What does “like” mean? What kind of likeness could explain perception: common constituents, matching size, or a similar condition? Does Theophrastus’s initial classification settle this? Test your definition against the mechanism he subsequently attributes to Empedocles.→ Why eyes do not hear. How does the account of passages explain why one sense cannot judge another’s objects? Distinguish an effluence that cannot enter from one that passes through without touching. What additional assumption makes either case a failure to perceive?→ Outgoing fire, incoming images. Does Aëtius report a single coordinated mechanism or evidence that can support two interpretations? Compare his cautious statement with the editorial claim that seeing is the meeting of outgoing and incoming processes. What supports that further step?→ An eye in its surroundings. Why would an eye with less fire see better by day, and one with excess fire see worse? Reconstruct the balance being proposed before considering Aristotle’s darkness objection. Which version of the theory does his objection target?→ The missing mixed colours. How does Theophrastus use grey to challenge the two kinds of visual passage? Does Aëtius’s list of four colours answer the objection, or simply add another claim that itself needs a mechanism and a correspondence with the roots?→ Who hears the bell? Why does placing a ringing structure inside the ear not yet explain hearing? Restate Theophrastus’s objection without using the word bell. What further account would prevent the explanation from merely moving the same question inside the body?→ Breathing and smelling. What distinguishes breathing as the cause of smell from breathing as an accompanying condition? How do Theophrastus’s counterexamples test the distinction? Does the head-cold notice answer him, or show only that the two processes can fail together?→ A gap or a partial answer? Theophrastus reports no separate mechanism for taste and touch. Does Aristotle’s notice about flavours hidden in water supply that mechanism, or only a claim about the object tasted? How should this qualify the editor’s assertion that the gap is filled?→ Where is the reflection? On the mirror account, what reaches the surface, what acts upon it, and where does the resulting image belong? Does treating reflection as a physical event explain why it resembles its object, or leave that relation unaccounted for?→ The lodestone’s special power. Reconstruct the proposed attraction of iron before choosing Alexander’s strongest objection. Does the mechanism explain why these bodies interact in this way rather than every pair with matching passages? What missing distinction would be needed?→
Thought, ratio & explanation10 questions+
What is bone? Why is a ratio a different kind of answer from a list of constituents? Does it explain what makes bone bone, how bone is produced, or both? What additional role would arrangement or function need to play?→ Love and the ratio. Aristotle asks whether Love causes any mixture or the mixture that accords with a ratio, and whether Love is itself that ratio. What different accounts of causation lie in these alternatives? Which does the testimony actually establish?→ A body with many souls? Reconstruct the argument from different tissue ratios to many souls. Which premise identifies soul with ratio, and is that premise reported or being tested? Could a ratio of the whole answer the objection without contradicting the evidence?→ Why should blood think? Why is blood given a special role if every bodily part contains the same roots? Does an especially balanced mixture explain thought itself or differences in thinking? Compare the claims about blood with attempts to locate a governing part.→ A skilled hand or a skilled person? Why does Theophrastus call the hand an instrument rather than the cause of craftsmanship? What does a well-blended bodily organ explain, and what remains unexplained about using it well? Could both sides be answering different questions?→ Must every mixture perceive? Why does the common mechanism seem to erase distinctions among mixture, growth, and perception? Is universal perception an unwanted consequence, or something a defender could accept? What evidence would distinguish acceptance from a critic’s reductio?→ Empty or full? State the dilemma about the passages being empty or occupied. Does Philoponus’s finer material remove the problem of void while leaving the problem of continual perception? What change would still need explaining when perception begins or stops?→ Does likeness do any work? Why does Theophrastus argue that fitting and contact can make likeness redundant? Distinguish necessary from sufficient conditions for perception. Could the account require both material likeness and geometrical fit, and where would that defence need textual support?→ A receptive organ. Why might an organ already full of a sound, flavour, or smell become less receptive rather than more? Does this refute all likeness-based explanations, or only an undifferentiated one? Identify the critic’s own assumption about perceptual change.→ Ignorance, pain, and truth. What follows if likeness produces both thinking and pleasure, while unlikeness produces ignorance and pain? Can the account distinguish a painful recognition from an agreeable mistake? Which distinctions would be needed to keep these experiences from collapsing together?→
Daimones, purification & the self10 questions+
Who passes into another body? What does Hippolytus report about daimones, and what does he then say about souls passing into living creatures? Does the notice establish that these are the same subject? Why does the editor’s warning about vocabulary matter here?→ Fire and the monad. How does the claim that everything comes from and returns to fire sit beside the four enduring roots? Which parts of Hippolytus’s account does the note identify as assimilation to other systems? What can remain usable despite that framing?→ What survives separation? The death notice says body and soul share dissolution “in this respect.” What does that qualification permit? Can persistence of constituents explain the survival of a particular wanderer, or is a further account of individual identity required?→ Mind shared with animals. Does identifying mind and soul entail that no animal is irrational in the strict sense? Separate the reported identity from the doxographer’s consequence. Even granting both, what would still be needed to establish transmigration?→ What is pure participation? What could it mean for pure people to share purely in divine souls? Does the notice describe a moral condition, a kind of composition, or a relation it does not explain? What must not be assumed merely from the word divine?→ Desire and deficiency. If appetite is a lack, how does a creature desire what is like it while needing something it does not sufficiently possess? Compare replenishment with the hottest animals seeking moisture. Is the apparent opposition resolved by distinguishing whole and part?→ The moon as a boundary. What does Hippolytus actually say about the reach of evils and the purer region above the moon? What further interpretive step connects this with the exile of daimones? Does the report itself identify the geography of that exile?→ Would unity end perception? Why does Theophrastus infer less perception, or none, under Love? Is an absence of effluence an absence of every kind of awareness? What would be required to attribute a different mode of knowing to the divine Sphairos?→ Two kinds of “madness.” What distinction does Caelius attribute to the followers of Empedocles, and what criteria for distinguishing the two kinds are missing? Why must this historical report not be treated as either Empedocles’ own explicit teaching or a present-day diagnostic rule?→ One undertaking, unresolved tensions. What is the strongest evidence here for reading physical explanation and purification together? What is the strongest obstacle? Distinguish a shared subject, an internally consistent system, and proof that the writings originally formed a single poem.→
Reception & the final examination10 questions+
Admiration without agreement. How can Lucretius praise Empedocles highly and reject his first principles? Does the continuation withdraw the praise or distinguish achievement from correctness? What conception of philosophical disagreement emerges when both passages are read together?→ What the reader reveals. Choose the physician, philosopher, or literary critic in Appendix I. What does that reader’s interest preserve, and what does it set aside? How does the appendix turn testimonia into evidence about their authors as well as their subject?→ Dante’s name and doctrine. Compare Empedocles’ place among named philosophers with the allusion to Love returning the world to chaos. How does the second passage transform a doctrine into a way of interpreting an event? What relation to the Sphairos does the editor propose?→ Milton’s inherited judgement. How does Milton’s use of the crater story assign a motive to its subject? Compare this with Horace’s use of the story. What disappears when a contested account becomes an example whose historical truth is no longer questioned?→ Arnold’s different Empedocles. How does Arnold change the meaning of the crater story? Distinguish his dramatic speaker’s claims from historical evidence. Does the appeal to the “elements” retain the sense of enduring roots, or use them for a different purpose?→ A refutation and its limits. The appendix says Timaeus demolished the crater story. Do his objections establish impossibility, undermine particular details, or justify suspending judgement? Why does that distinction matter when judging the legend’s survival?→ Reading Aristotle against himself. Compare the charge of inconsistency, the moral reading of the powers, and the concession about bone. Where does Aristotle preserve an argument, and where does he reframe it? Give an example of each, avoiding wholesale acceptance or rejection.→ Socrates asks for a cause. In the Phaedo passage printed here, what does the young Socrates want from inquiry into nature? Would a list of constituents, a bodily location, or a ratio satisfy his questions? Explain the difference between identifying a condition and giving an explanation.→ An impressive definition. What must be accepted before the Meno exchange can define colour through effluences and passages? Does shared vocabulary produce understanding, or conceal what still needs explaining? Test the editor’s interpretation against the exchange printed here.→ Your account, and its limit. State your strongest account of how roots, cosmic powers, perception, and the wandering self belong together. Support it with three testimonia, identify one objection it cannot yet answer, and distinguish your reconstruction from anything this volume establishes beyond dispute.→