Aristotle’s De anima provides the foundation for a theoretically informed study of perishable life on the crucial assumption that the soul is that which distinguishes what is alive from what is not. It is because Aristotle and Theophrastus take animals and plants to be different kinds of perishable living beings that they are justified in approaching the study of perishable life through separate studies of animals and plants. The chapter offers a survey of the discourse on and around life before Aristotle and Theophrastus with a focus on Plato and the doxographical information on the Presocratic investigation of nature. It also considers the way in which the study of life is narrow down to the study of perishable life, that is animals and plants, as a result of the conceptual work done in Aristotle’s De anima.

B 115 is generally regarded as the reference fragment of Empedocles’ doctrine of rebirth, being the place where he presents himself as a god banished from the divine community as a result of certain crimes, sent into exile on our earth and here condemned to be reborn as all kinds of mortal beings. In Chapter 1 I argue that, contrary to the vast majority of editions of Empedocles’ fragments, B 115 belongs to the incipit of his physical poem. The chapter mostly focuses on the Strasbourg papyrus and the evidence it uncovered that is relevant to the question of the character and content of the physical poem. After questioning the basis on which scholars have placed B 115 within the Purifications, I will show that the Strasbourg papyrus provides strong proof for its allocation within On Nature. The relocation of this central fragment thus sets the stage for a re-evaluation of Empedocles’ physical system in its entirety, by indicating that it consists of mythical and religious themes in synergy with more strictly physical principles.

In a well-known passage (Juv. 13 (7).473a15–474a24), Aristotle preserves a fragment of Empedocles’ poem dealing with respiration, in which the clepsydra is used as a model for breathing. Although there is a substantial literature on this subject, most scholars have focused on explaining Empedocles’ account of the mode of operation of the clepsydra as well as on assessing the extent to which Aristotle’s interpretation does justice to Empedocles’ fragment. What has received little attention is the fact that Aristotle begins his criticism of Empedocles by offering a specific counterproposal of his own, one that rests on the idea that the mechanism of respiration can be explained in a much clearer fashion through the analogy of a forge bellows. References to bellows are actually already traceable to Homer. At the same time, the bellows–lungs analogy continued to be used for centuries after Aristotle. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the existing literary and archaeological evidence about bellows in Greek antiquity in order to build a complete picture of its function and hence clarify Aristotle’s theory of respiration.

In On the Nature of the Human Being, Polybus claims that the humors, like everything else, are composed of four substances: the hot, the cold, the dry, and the wet. He also discusses humoral flux – the idea that a single humor, after gathering in one part of the body, can create a wide range of effects by flowing to different parts. This chapter argues that Polybus’s thinking about cosmological principles is closely tied to his interest in humoral flux. Both concepts are motivated by an interest in tracing diseases to their “source” (arche), and both ultimately establish a two-pronged approach to treatment, wherein doctors are expected to target both the proximate cause of a disease (i.e., a concentrated humor) and its remote cause (i.e., the factor(s) that initially caused that humor to separate out). This chapter further argues that an interest in individual differences does not preclude a coexisting interest in cosmological principles. Instead, Polybus presents his cosmological principles as a solution to the problem of individual variation, identifying the shared “nature” (phusis) of human beings as a high-level commonality that transcends individual differences.

Aristotle’s longest and most comprehensive critical discussion of Empedocles’ natural philosophy occurs in GC II 6. He structures his criticism around four Empedoclean theses. (1) There are four kinds of elemental body and instances of these kinds do not change into one another. (2) Everything that comes to be by nature does so by chance. (3) Love and strife are the principles of natural bodily movement. (4) Soul is, or is constituted by, one or more of the four elemental bodies. I discuss Aristotle’s arguments against each of these theses in detail. Though Aristotle’s arguments are predominantly negative, we can view them as collectively constituting a sustained defense of the superiority of his preferred account. Aristotle’s natural philosophy centers on his novel understanding of nature as an internal principle and cause of movement and rest. I argue that the phenomena Empedocles is unable to explain adequately or endorse consistently are precisely the phenomena that Aristotle’s conception of nature is well-suited to explain.

Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

In DA I.2–5, Aristotle offers a series of critical discussions of earlier Greek definitions of the soul. The status of these discussions and the role they play in the justification of Aristotle’s theory of soul in DA II–III is controversial. In contrast to a common view, I argue that these discussions are not dialectical but philosophical. I also contend that Aristotle does not consider earlier philosophical definitions of soul to be endoxa, but rather contradoxa – beliefs about which the many and the wise disagree among themselves. Through an analysis of Plato’s and Empedocles’s definitions of soul, I show that these definitions are nevertheless treated by Aristotle as potential scientific principles for explaining two of the soul’s per se attributes: causing motion and cognition in animate bodies. The main role of the critical discussions in DA I.2–5 is to show that all such earlier definitions of soul fail this explanatory task. Nevertheless, I show that these chapters are not wholly aporetic. Aristotle makes progress by solving two scientific puzzles within them: whether the soul has spatial parts, and whether ‘soul’ refers to a uniform entity across biological species.

In this chapter I develop the point that the knowledge Aristotle particularly wants to explain is knowledge of beings. I work from certain problems he thinks prevented his predecessors from defining psuchē satisfactorily. I focus on two issues in particular: whether knowledge is “like by like” and “alteration.” I argue that the problem raised by both issues is at bottom the same. If knowledge is alteration, and is “like by like,” the result is that our knowledge is so colored by arbitrary facts about us as to belie the idea that it is really of beings as they are “in themselves.” If knowledge is not “like by like,” and leaves its subjects unaltered, the result is to make it unintelligible in principle why subjects of knowledge have anything to do with its putative objects. In short, the problem is how to respect the fact that knowledge is of beings, as they are in their own right, without rendering that fact an inscrutable mystery. For these points I rely on De Anima I 2, III 3, and Metaphysics G 5. These texts combine to establish that, for Aristotle, the outstanding representative of the problems in this area is Protagoras.

This study examines the evidence for the celestial afterlife in Greek philosophy before Plato. Starting from Plato’s Phaedo myth, where we find evidence for three levels of life for souls (our level, the ‘aithêr-dwellers’ above us, and, above that, a more mysterious third level), it argues that such a stratified cosmos was not original to Plato, but can be found in certain of his predecessors. The two best-documented instances of it occur in Heraclitus and the new, Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles. Both thinkers, in attempting to frame the place of soul in the order of nature, also adopt a stratified, hierarchical cosmic scheme, with rewards and demotions along the vertical axis. But they also thereby take up positions on the nature of soul: What stuff is it made of? Is it (essentially) immortal or not? And if not, can its immortality be secured? Against Plato’s later doctrine of an essentially immortal soul, both conceive of soul as somehow physical and, for different reasons, appear to deny its full or essential immortality.

The chapter sketches a broad picture of some ideas, antecedent to Aristotle’s work, about the origin and development of living beings. Against the background of the new cosmological and metaphysical framework of Aristotle’s biological enterprise, it emphasizes what distinguishes Aristotle from the Presocratics and Plato: his rejection of a shared causal story that would account for both the origin of the universe and the birth of animals and plants. This shift helps to make intelligible Aristotle’s rejection of hylozoism and of the opposite view that life arises, mysteriously, from inanimate material ingredients. To demonstrate that Aristotle discusses the biological views of his predecessors without directly using them to build his own theory, the chapter first turns to Presocratic fragments, mostly of Anaximander and Empedocles, which connect biological matters and cosmogony. Second, the chapter takes a fresh look at how Plato reshapes this connection in his Timaeus, offering a new account of the nature of the universe and the nature of human beings. This account then enables us to evaluate, in the chapter’s final section, the changes that Aristotle brings to the study of living beings, including his rejection of the notion of the latter’s progressive formation.

This chapter compares Aristotle’s theory of generation and Darwinian evolution by natural selection. It begins by explicating Aristotle’s distinction between intrinsic (kat’auta) and incidental (kata sumbêbêkos) final causation. Aristotle uses this distinction to differentiate Empedocles’ account of generation as incidentally final from his own intrinsically final view. Like Empedocles, Aristotle accepts spontaneous generation, but only as an exception to formal, sexual reproduction. In consequence, he describes spontaneous generation differently from Empedocles.

The chapter goes on to argue that by these standards Darwinian natural selection is intrinsically final and biologically (but not cosmologically) teleological. Accordingly, it is not nearly as similar to Empedocles’ primitive theory of “natural selection” as is sometimes assumed. That this difference was not apparent to Darwin’s contemporaries, or even to Darwin himself, is attributed to Darwinism’s subtle mixture of chance, determinism, and biological teleology. At first, the effects of medieval creationism on Aristotle’s hylomorphism and deterministic views about science were prominent factors standing in the way of understanding the logic of adaptive natural selection. Mid-twentieth-century Neo-Darwinism made the telic logic of Darwinian adaptation more perspicuous. Recent developments in regulatory genetics promise to give evolutionary meaning to something akin to Aristotle’s epigenetic account of generation.

This chapter begins by tracing the implications of Empedocles’ philosophy for poetry, arguing that he valorises the medium against criticisms expressed by earlier Presocratics. His cosmology provides systematic explanation for poetic beauty as deriving from Love. He uses the imagery of craftsmanship for the composition of his poetry, making it seem analogous to the products of Love, the divine craftswoman. This point is significant for the history of Greek poetics, since some scholars have argued that the artisanal conception of poetry emerges only at a later period. The chapter then focuses on Empedocles’ use of narrative, arguing that two particular plot-types structure the surviving fragments: the wandering exile who arrives in triumph at a new destination and the process of mystic initiation. Finally, it explores the significance and effects of Empedocles’ use of these narratives. He expands to cosmic proportions the familiar pattern of the blood-exile who achieves purification on arrival at a new location through the instigation of new institutions. The process of being ‘initiated’ into Empedocles’ philosophy involves an initially fearsome but ultimately exhilarating and sublime emotional trajectory which results in the student/initiate gaining a deeper insight into the workings of the universe.

The Introduction sets out the aims and methods of the book. It outlines how the literary-critical approach adopted differs from the predominately philosophical interests of existing scholarship on these texts. A key distinction is the focus on the emotional experiences of audiences rather than narrowly defined argumentative content. The treatment of Archaic verse as literature is defended against the charge of anachronism: some have argued that early Greek verse differs essentially from later literature in that it was valued primarily for its purported truthfulness, but the ‘truth’ of Archaic Greek poetry seems to go far beyond mere factual accuracy, encompassing symbolic and emotional truths that are also hallmarks of later conceptions of the literary. Furthermore, the modern perspectival theory of literary truth espoused by many theorists articulates a concept that is already implicit in the emphasis on the visual quality of verse found in Homer and ancient criticism. It will be argued that Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles use verse in conformity with a poetics of truth in this expanded sense. Finally, this chapter explains how the book will use the surviving fragments of these authors as a source for ideas about the nature and function of poetry.

The central aim of this book has been to enrich our reading of these texts, and so its main value resides in the specific readings it has generated. Nevertheless, some more general points have emerged and are here summarised. These authors were not restrained by their medium but rather masters of it, so that their use of verse cannot be fully explained by recourse to the circumstances of production. Their texts are designed to elicit emotional and cognitive responses from the audience that are contingent on form and phrasing. In this sense, they qualify as poetry rather than mere verse. The conclusion traces some implications of this suggestion for the contested question of whether or not verse plays an essential philosophical role for the three authors in question. It then summarises the main points made earlier in the book concerning their role in the history of Greek poetics. Finally, it highlights certain poetic techniques they deploy that would become characteristic of the didactic genre.

Empedocles (about 492–430 BCE) promoted himself as a daimon in flesh. He told a cosmic story about how daimones fell from their blessed state and the mode of their return. The pure daimon is a spherical being made up of the energy of Love. Owing to a moral fault, the individual daimon falls into flesh and enters a drawn-out cycle of moral and physical purification. The fallen daimon purifies itself by living the lives of different animals and plants and by not eating substances that contain the daimonic essence. Empedocles is historically significant for his focus on individual and present daimonification, and for his cosmic story of daimonic fall and redemption, a story moralized by Plato and his intellectual heirs.

Chapter 6 is the longest and the most elaborate chapter of De mundo. The topic of the chapter is God and his relation to the cosmos. This relation is explained by a sequence of no less than twelve analogies. It is argued that this proliferation of analogies is not an extravagant rhetorical profusion, but an elaborate explanatory device that affords the reader a fuller grasp of God: the sequence is composed in such a way that one analogy corrects or supplements another, thus building a complex conception of God in the mind of the reader. Following a detailed analysis of the analogies and their relations, the conception of God that emerges is discussed. It is argued that this conception is a distinctly Aristotelian one, albeit with some interesting elaborations and additions. The absence of Aristotle’s technical terms in the explanation of God and his relation to the world, it is suggested, is a consequence of the author’s attempt to make the Aristotelian conception of God attractive to non-Aristotelians as well. This contribution ends with a note on the use of quotations in Chapter 6, since nine out of the twelve quotations in De mundo are found in this one chapter.

This paper investigates the significance of philosophical themes to Ennius’ representation of Roman history in the Annals. In particular, it focuses on two recurring motifs in Ennius’ literary production – namely, the Empedoclean doctrine of the four elements and the destiny of souls after death – and interprets them as ways to speak about historical change and cultural transfer. Ultimately, I aim to show that the narrative of the Annals was articulated into multiple reading levels, and that the embedding of philosophy in historical epic stressed the role of political communities as links between the human and the divine sphere.