Catherine Joanna Rowett

It is no longer generally believed that Empedocles was the divided character portrayed by nineteenth-century scholars, a man whose scientific and religious views were incompatible but untouched by each other. Yet it is still widely held that, however unitary his thought, nevertheless he still wrote more than one poem, and that his poems can be clearly divided between those which do, and those which do not, concern ‘religious matters’.1 Once this assumption can be shown to be shaky or actually false, the grounds for dividing the quotations of Empedocles into two poems by subject matter disappear; and without that division our interpretation of Empedocles stands in need of radical revision. This paper startswith the modest task of showing that Empedocles may have written only one philosophical poem and not two, and goes on to suggest some of the ways in which we have to rethink the whole story if he did. If all our material belongs to one poem we are bound to link the cycle of the daimones with that of the elements, and this has far-reaching consequences for our interpretation.

When Empedocles uses a divine name for one of the items in his ontology, does this serve merely as a poetic metaphor or does it mean that the item in question is a god, with personal agency and intentions? In Empedocles’ poem, most things are described as if they were intentional agents and seem to function as such. Is there anything in the universe that does not have a mind or does not engage in intentional action? In this paper I argue that Empedocles was talking of a universe in which all the components, without exception, are living beings with mental capacities and that their power is the power of agents, acting voluntarily, not of inanimate forces acting mechanically. There is nothing in Empedocles’ ontology that could be described as inert matter, and there are no inanimate things.

If Socrates is portrayed holding one view in one of Plato's dialogues and a different view in another, should we be puzzled? If (as I suggest) Plato's Socrates is neither the historical Socrates, nor a device for delivering Platonic doctrine, but a tool for the dialectical investigation of a philosophical problem, then we should expect a new Socrates, with relevant commitments, to be devised for each setting. Such a dialectical device – the tailor-made Socrates – fits with what we know of other contributions to the genre of the Sokratikos Logos, to which Plato was neither the first nor the only contributor.

In this paper I argue, controversially, that Plato's Meno anticipates Wittgenstein's critique of essentialism. Plato is usually read as an essentialist of the very kind that Wittgenstein was challenging, and the Meno in particular is usually taken as evidence that Plato thought that to know something you must be able to define it, and that if you can't define it you can't investigate any other questions on the topic. I suggest instead that Plato shows Socrates proposing such a position (much as Wittgenstein's imaginary interlocutor might do), only to have it knocked down by what happens in the dialogue. Plato shows that one knows a concept when one can apply it in practice, or, for virtue, when one typically chooses to act in certain ways, passes certain judgements and so on. It turns out, then, that one who claims to "know what virtue is" need not give necessary and sufficient conditions for it.

The motifs of love and seduction in the Phaedrus are not about sexual love but about philosophy, and particularly about two different approaches to philosophy, one engaged and emotionally, even poetically, involved and one cold, rational and detached. Socrates' palinode speech in the Phaedrus contrasts the lover of beauty whose philosophical sensitivities enable the wings to grow and intellectual vision to occur, with the cool rational character of the non-lover who has no place for love of beauty and cares only for utility and reason. When Socrates took the part of the non-lover, and denigrated the value of love in philosophical enquiry, in his first speech that attacked love as a distorting factor, and praised reason devoid of emotion, he had been seduced by a calculating and over-rational love of "speeches" which is the dominant character of Phaedrus, cool lover of reason with no emotional intelligence.

I start by asking what Aristotle knew (or thought) about Heraclitus: what were the key features of Heraclitus's philosophy as far as Aristotle was concerned? In this section of the paper I suggest that there are some patterns to Aristotle's references to Heraclitus: besides the classic doctrines (flux, ekpyrosis and the unity of opposites) on the one hand, and the opening of Heraclitus's book on the other, Aristotle knows and reports a few slightly less obvious sayings, one of which is in my title. Secondly, I ask some further questions. Is there any systematic connection between the bits that Aristotle reports? Do they hang together? Ought we to see here some relic of an Aristotelian understanding of what made Heraclitus tick? If we juxtapose these themes and Aristotle's comments on them, I suggest, we can generate some suggestive motifs, in particular a rather curious fascination with smoking, and the pleasures of inhaling. Finally, I suggest that smells (and the way the world would be if smells were the only differences to be discerned) are important in understanding what Heraclitus was doing.