Patricia Curd

How is it that Empedocles’ world is is an organized system of diverse entities and how does this system of maintain regularity over long periods of time? I suggest that it is the impulses and thoughts of the roots and of Love and Strife that answer these questions. Love and Strife, working within the laws of nature provide the major structural aspects of the cosmos: the circular motion of the whirls created by the opposing forces produce the masses of roots that are worked up into the heavenly bodies and the living things that populate the cosmos. It is useful to conceive of Empedocles as a proto-power-structuralist. The basic ingredients of the world are ontologically prior to the medium sized objects of sensible experience: it is not the case that there are underlying Aristotelian subjects with properties and attributes depending on those subjects.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (a major Greek city of Ionian Asia Minor), a Greek philosopher of the 5th century B.C.E. (born ca. 500–480), was the first of the Presocratic philosophers to live in Athens. He propounded a physical theory of “everything-in-everything,” and claimed that nous (intellect or mind) was the motive cause of the cosmos. He was the first to give a correct explanation of eclipses, and was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories, including the claims that the sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the moon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones. Anaxagoras maintained that the original state of the cosmos was a mixture of all its ingredients (the basic realities of his system). The ingredients are thoroughly mixed, so that no individual ingredient as such is evident, but the mixture is not entirely uniform or homogeneous.