Empedocles – författare

One of the most important Presocratic philosophers was the Sicilian Empedocles.  He presented his work in the form of two hexameter poems, of which about 450 lines are extant, revealing a formidable range of interests, acute observation, and a firm grasp of fundamental issues in the study of man and nature.Empedocles’ theory of four elements was crucial to later developments in science and medicine.  He showed how forces of attraction and repulsion acted on the elements within a framework of cyclical time and limited space, and initiated or advanced major discoveries in astronomy, biology, and physiology.  More sophisticated concepts of divinity, personality, and mortality replaced traditional mythology, and these concepts were founded on the conviction that the individual has control over his own character and intellectual growth.The introduction discusses Empedocles’ life and interests, the content of the Physics and Katharmoi, and the relation of the two poems to each other.  A new Greek text with apparatus is followed by translation, commentary, and detailed concordance, to give a comprehensive edition of this key figure in the history of ideas.“With its careful and judicious editing of the fragments and its many fresh insights into Empedocles’ thought, this work will be indispensable to students of Presocratic philosophy.”—Alexander P.D. Mourelatos

Parmenides and Empedocles, along with Heraclitus the most important of the pre-Socratic philosophers, were at the same time among the greatest poets of the ancient world. But their work is rarely treated and still more rarely translated in its original form--as poetry. The complete extant fragments of Parmenides and Empedocles are collected here for the first time in a translation responsive to the original verse texts. Parmenides' philosophical fragments are here given as the poetic remains of the thinker from Elea in Southern Italy whom Socrates wondered at and Plato held in awe. What emerges from the poetry is at once an uncompromising vision of absolute Being and a compassionate understanding of the human cosmos:It is the body grows to Mind. All men desire the same thing, apprehend the sameThe plenum is thought, and thought preponderates. The poetry of Empedocles--reincarnationist, naturalist, cosmologist, religious leader, physiologist, and a metaphysician--is presented here in the personal idiom of the fifth-century Sicilian who has been called the last of the Greek shamans:I have already beenA bush and a birdA boy and a girlA mute fish in the sea.