{"_index":"sire","_id":"491","_score":null,"_source":{"id":491,"authors_free":[{"id":672,"entry_id":491,"agent_type":null,"is_normalised":null,"person_id":298,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Sedley, David N.","free_first_name":"David N.","free_last_name":"Sedley","norm_person":{"id":298,"first_name":"David N.","last_name":"Sedley","full_name":"Sedley, David N.","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/12143141X","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}},{"id":673,"entry_id":491,"agent_type":null,"is_normalised":null,"person_id":204,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":2,"role_name":"editor"},"free_name":"Pierr\u0113s, Apostolos L.","free_first_name":"Apostolos L.","free_last_name":"Pierr\u0113s","norm_person":{"id":204,"first_name":"Apostolos L.","last_name":"Pierr\u0113s","full_name":"Pierr\u0113s, Apostolos L.","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/1034968068","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"Empedocles' Life Cycles","main_title":{"title":"Empedocles' Life Cycles"},"abstract":"In his poem On Nature, Empedocles described two cycles, a cosmic one and a daimonic one. The cosmic cycle is one of alternating world phases, governed in turn by two divine powers called Love and Strife, each phase explicitly said (B17.1-5, B26.4-6) to contain its own creation of life forms. The daimonic cycle is also governed by Love and Strife. A superior race of daimons, after living in blissful peace during the days of Love\u2019s dominance, committed under the pernicious influence of Strife the cardinal sins of animal slaughter, meat eating, and oath-breaking. For these sins, they have been banished from bliss for ten thousand years, condemned to be reborn as all manner of living things, until their eventual return to bliss\u2014a return which Empedocles, at the beginning of his poem The Purifications, announced he had himself finally achieved.\r\n\r\nIt was once the policy of scholars to keep these two cycles firmly segregated, certainly in different poems and, if possible, in separate and irreconcilable areas of Empedocles' thought: one scientific, the other religious. That old separatist policy was already all but extinct when, in 1998, a newly discovered papyrus containing portions of Empedocles\u2019 On Nature was published by Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi, putting the final nail in its coffin. For there, the daimonic cycle was to be found in the immediate context of Empedocles\u2019 physics.\r\n\r\nIf we are to make adequate sense of Empedocles\u2019 zoogony\u2014his theory of the origins of life\u2014it must include the creation of these daimons. Contrary to a common scholarly assumption, the daimons are themselves flesh-and-blood organisms, not mere transmigrating souls or spirits. Indeed, their sin of meat-eating would have been quite hard to perform if they had not been.\r\n\r\nThe following view, and variants of it, are widely held about Empedocles\u2019 aetiology of life forms. He posits two zoogonies: one governed by Love, the other by Strife. The zoogony of Love occurs in a phase of increasing Love, which eventually leads to the world\u2019s conversion into the perfectly homogeneous sphairos. The zoogony of Strife occurs in a phase of increasing Strife, which eventually leads to the total separation of the four elementary bodies or \u2018roots.\u2019 And it is this latter world that Empedocles considered himself to inhabit.\r\n\r\nA major obstacle to this widespread (though by no means unanimous) picture lies in Empedocles\u2019 concentration on Love\u2019s zoogony, to the almost total exclusion of Strife\u2019s. When it comes to the emergence of species, it is again and again what our evidence informs us to be the zoogony of increasing Love that is described, as we shall see amply confirmed in due course. As to Strife\u2019s zoogony, we have nothing but an isolated description in B62 of the first stage of the process by which, under growing Strife, men and women were created. The fragment is further summarized and expanded by Aetius (below, pp. 337-38) and now helpfully supported by a cross-reference in the Strasbourg fragments (d10-14). But despite this additional material, and the probability that trees too were included, there is not so much as a word about the generation, under Strife, of any other animal species known to us.\r\n\r\nThus, if the pattern of survival is to any extent representative of what was in the original poem, the widely favored interpretation that I have sketched faces the anomaly that Empedocles apparently spent far more time accounting for the origin of life forms which he could do no more than conjecture to have existed in a remote part of cosmic history (and which can have left no descendants in the world we ourselves inhabit, since the sphairos has intervened to render them extinct), than he did on accounting for life as we know it.\r\n\r\nAlthough it is by no means obvious why Empedocles should have assumed the reverse cosmic process, in the supposed counterworld, to have thrown up the very same life forms that we find in our own world, it is widely held that he did, for whatever reasons, commit himself to this view. But the evidence is, on inspection, vanishingly weak.\r\n\r\nIt consists mainly in Aristotle's assertion (GC II6, 334a5-7; A42) that Empedocles \"also says that the world is in the same state now, under Strife, as previously under Love.\" I am not the first to point out that \"under Love\" and \"under Strife\" need not necessarily mean under increasing Love or increasing Strife, which would in fact be irrelevant to Aristotle's point in the context.\r\n\r\nAristotle is trying to uncover contradictions between Empedocles\u2019 various assertions about the respective motive powers of Love and Strife, and his question here is how, if Love and Strife differ from each other in their motive powers, Empedocles can hold that the world has the same basic arrangement and motions of the four simple bodies in an age dominated by Strife as it previously had in one dominated by Love\u2014i.e., in ages in which, regardless of the actual direction of change, it is Love and Strife, respectively, that govern cosmic processes.\r\n\r\n(It may be that his wording does also carry implications about the current direction of change, but his main point in no way depends on any such implication.) [introduction p. 331-333]","btype":2,"date":"2005","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/q7rH00eYu70k9Td","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":298,"full_name":"Sedley, David N.","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}},{"id":204,"full_name":"Pierr\u0113s, Apostolos L.","role":{"id":2,"role_name":"editor"}}],"book":null,"booksection":{"id":491,"section_of":317,"pages":"331-371","is_catalog":null,"book":{"id":317,"bilderberg_idno":null,"dare_idno":null,"catalog_idno":null,"entry_type":null,"type":4,"language":"en","title":"The Empedoclean Kosmos. Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity. structure, process and the question of cyclicity ; proceedings of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Tertium Myconense, July 6th - July 13th, 2003. Papers","title_transcript":"","title_translation":"","short_title":"Pierres2005","has_no_author":null,"volume":null,"date":"2005","edition_no":null,"free_date":"2005","abstract":"Review by\r\nJenny Bryan, Homerton College, Cambridge: This is a collection of fifteen papers presented at the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Tertium Myconense held on Mykonos in July 2003. If this volume is any indication, the meeting must have been a lively affair. It includes work by many of the most influential modern scholars of Empedocles and covers a wide range of topics from the reception of Empedocles to his methodology of argumentation to the details of his cosmology. In addition, Apostolos Pierris provides, in an appendix, a reconstruction of Empedocles\u2019 poem. Several themes emerge from the various papers, most notably the notion of scientific versus religious thinking, the unity of his poem(s?), the importance of the Strasbourg Papyrus, and Aristotle\u2019s role in shaping our understanding of Empedocles\u2019 cycle. As a whole, the book\u2019s most obvious and perhaps most exciting theme is that of \u2018Strife\u2019. This \u2018Strife\u2019 is not, however, Empedocles\u2019 cosmic force (although he does, of course, loom large). Rather it is the kind of discord that seems to arise whenever there is more than one (or maybe even just one) interpreter of Empedocles in the room. This, of course, is no bad thing. This volume represents Pre-Socratic scholarship at its most dynamic.\r\n\r\nIn general, editing seems to have been rather \u2018hands off\u2019. Some papers offer primary texts only in Greek, others include translations. One piece in particular is sprinkled with typos and misspellings that do a disservice to its argumentative force.1 That being said, thought has clearly been given to the grouping of the papers. I particularly benefited from the juxtaposition of those papers explicitly about Empedocles\u2019 cosmic cycles, if only because it illustrates the strength of disagreement which this topic continues to inspire. Thus, for example, whilst Primavesi employs the Byzantine scholia as the linchpin of his reconstruction of the cycle, Osborne dismisses the same as \u2018probably worthless as evidence for how Empedocles himself intended his system to work\u2019 (299). Whatever position you hold, or indeed if you hold no position at all, this collection will present you with something to get your teeth into.\r\n\r\nAnthony Kenny\u2019s \u2018Life after Etna: the legend of Empedocles in literary tradition\u2019 offers a whistle-stop tour through accounts of Empedocles\u2019 reputed death on Etna, and then arrives at a more extensive discussion of Matthew Arnold\u2019s \u2018Empedocles on Etna\u2019. Kenny points out that, at times, Arnold\u2019s Empedocles resembles Lucretius, of whom Arnold was an admirer from childhood. Kenny concludes with the suggestion that, although \u2018Empedocles on Etna\u2019 may be more about Arnold than Empedocles, there is an affinity between the two men: \u2018Empedocles, part magus and part scientist, was, like Arnold, poised between two worlds, one dead, one struggling to be born\u2019 (30).\r\n\r\nGlenn Most offers a rather fascinating discussion of Nietzsche\u2019s Empedocles in his \u2018The stillbirth of tragedy: Nietzsche and Empedocles\u2019. Most reveals the extent to which Empedocles \u2018played quite a significant role in Nietzsche\u2019s intellectual world\u2019 (33). Although Nietzsche made some abortive attempts at a philosophical discussion of Empedocles, he was \u2018far less interested in Empedocles as a thinker than as a human being\u2019 (35). Such was his admiration for Empedocles, whom he viewed as \u2018der reine tragische Mensch\u2019, that, perhaps under the influence of H\u00f6lderlin, Nietzsche formed the (unfulfilled) intention of writing an opera or tragedy about him. Most suggests, in passing, that the tendency for reception of Empedocles to take dramatic form could be due to the influence of Heraclides Pontus (whose dialogue about Empedocles may have formed a source of Diogenes Laertius\u2019 account).\r\n\r\nIn \u2018Empedocles: two theologies, two projects\u2019, Jean Bollack rails against attempts made, on the basis of the Strasbourg Papyrus, to narrow the gap between Empedocles\u2019 physical and ethical theories. He interprets \u2018The Origins\u2019 and \u2018The Purifications\u2019 as offering two distinct theologies, tailored to suit the purpose, strategy, and audience of each poem. His view is that \u2018[t]he two poems were very probably intended to shed light on one another precisely in their difference\u2019 (47). Bollack also offers, in an appendix, a rereading of fragment B31 \u2018extended by the Strasbourg Papyrus\u2019 (62).\r\n\r\nRene N\u00fcnlist\u2019s \u2018Poetological imagery in Empedocles\u2019 considers the apparent echo of Parmenides B8\u2019s \u03ba\u1f79\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f10\u03c0\u1f73\u03c9\u03bd in Empedocles B17\u2019s \u03bb\u1f79\u03b3\u03bf\u03c5 \u03c3\u03c4\u1f79\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2. N\u00fcnlist argues that Empedocles\u2019 \u2018poetological imagery\u2019 is more dynamic and potentially more aggressive than that of his predecessor. Empedocles uses path metaphors to \u2018convey the idea of philosophical poetry being a process or a method\u2019 (79). N\u00fcnlist also provides a brief appendix on line 10 of ensemble d of the Strasbourg Papyrus.\r\n\r\nRichard Janko returns to the vexed question of whether Empedocles wrote one poem or two in his \u2018Empedocles\u2019 Physica Book 1: a new reconstruction\u2019. Janko presents a masterful summary of the evidence for and against trying to unite Empedocles\u2019 physical and religious verses, admitting his preference for accepting Katharmoi and Physika as two titles for the same work (which discussed both physical theory and ritual purification). On this topic, I benefitted particularly from his discussion of the fragments of Lobon of Argos (another possible source for Diogenes Laertius). This discussion serves as the introduction to Janko\u2019s reconstruction and translation of 131 lines of Book 1 of Empedocles\u2019 Physics, in which he attempts to incorporate some of the ensembles of the Strasbourg Papyrus, which he suggests \u2018at last gives us a clear impression of Empedocles as a poet\u2019 (113).\r\n\r\nIn \u2018On the question of religion and natural philosophy in Empedocles\u2019, Patricia Curd neatly sidesteps the \u2018one poem or two?\u2019 question, formulating instead a distinction between Empedocles\u2019 \u2018esoteric\u2019 and \u2018exoteric\u2019 teachings. She then attempts to establish an essential relation between the two. Curd argues that the exoteric verses, addressed to a plural \u2018you\u2019, offer exhortation and instruction as to how to live a certain kind of life without any \u2018serious teaching\u2019 (145). On the other hand, the esoteric verses addressed to Pausanias offer explanation but lack any direct instruction. Curd\u2019s suggestion is that Empedocles holds that \u2018one must be in the proper state of soul in order to learn and so acquire and hold the most important knowledge\u2019 (153). Further, she argues for reading Empedocles as holding the possession of such natural knowledge as the source of super-natural powers. Curd\u2019s Baconian Empedocles \u2018sees knowledge of the world as bestowing power to control the world\u2019 (153).\r\n\r\nRichard McKirahan\u2019s \u2018Assertion and argument in Empedocles\u2019 cosmology or what did Empedocles learn from Parmenides?\u2019 offers a subtle and stimulating survey of \u2018the devices [Empedocles] uses to gain belief\u2019 (165). McKirahan attempts a rehabilitation of Empedocles against Barnes\u2019s assertion that those reading his cosmology \u2018look in vain for argument, either inductive or deductive.\u20192 Offering persuasive evidence from the fragments, he argues that Empedocles employs both assertion and justification (via both argument and analogy) in his cosmology and that the choice between the two is fairly systematic. McKirahan frames his suggestions within a reconsideration of Empedocles\u2019 debt to Parmenides, arguing that, in places, \u2018Empedocles seems to be adding new Eleatic-style arguments for Eleatic-style theses\u2019 (183).\r\n\r\nApostolos Pierris argues for a \u2018tripartite correspondence\u2019 (189) between Empedoclean religion, philosophy and physics in his \u2018 \u1f4d\u03bc\u03bf\u03b9\u03bf\u03bd \u1f41\u03bc\u03bf\u1f77\u1ff3 and \u0394\u1f77\u03bd\u03b7 : Nature and Function of Love and Strife in the Empedoclean system.\u2019 Pierris traces the connection between these three aspects of Empedocles\u2019 thinking via an investigation of the relation between the activity of Love and Strife and the role of the cosmic vortex, reconsidering Aristotle\u2019s critique along the way. He concludes that \u2018in understanding Empedocles\u2019 system of Cosmos both [i.e., metaphysical and physical levels of discourse] are equally needed, for one sheds light on the other\u2019 (213). Further, the physical and metaphysical accounts of the Sphairos and the effects of Love and Strife aid our awareness of our ethical status.\r\n\r\nIn \u2018The topology and dynamics of Empedocles\u2019 cycle\u2019, Daniel Graham attempts a sidelong offensive on the puzzles of Empedocles\u2019 cosmic cycle, armed with a plausible belief that a treatment of the cosmic forces of Love and Strife will shed light on the cycle that they dominate. He offers a neat summary of traditional readings of the location and direction of the action of Love and Strife before presenting a defence of the position developed by O\u2019Brien.3 Graham argues that this so-called \u2018Oscillation Theory\u2019 makes the most sense of Empedocles\u2019 use of military imagery in B35. He also presents a rather illuminating political analogy whereby Empedocles\u2019 Love serves to avoid a kind of cosmic stasis.\r\n\r\nOliver Primavesi\u2019s \u2018The structure of Empedocles\u2019 cosmic cycle: Aristotle and the Byzantine Anonymous\u2019 also has in its sights O\u2019Brien\u2019s reconstruction of the Empedoclean cycle. Primavesi argues against this reconstruction on the grounds that \u2018O\u2019Brien\u2019s hypothesis of symmetrical major alternation of rest and movement is [\u2026] exclusively based on a controversial interpretation of Aristotle, Physics 8, 1\u2032 (257). As an alternative, Primavesi adduces a set of Byzantine scholia which seem to conflict with O\u2019Brien\u2019s alternations and which were \u2018composed in a time when access to a complete work of Empedocles was still open\u2019 (257).4 Primavesi concludes by hypothesising a timetable for the cycle compatible with the scholia.\r\n\r\nAndr\u00e9 Laks considers the relationship between Empedocles\u2019 cosmology and demonology in his \u2018Some thoughts about Empedoclean cosmic and demonic cycles\u2019. He champions a \u2018correspondence model\u2019 of interpretation, arguing that, although the two accounts are distinct, they are also clearly related. Laks suggests that one clear point of relation is the shared cyclicity of the cosmic and demonic stories. Laks focuses his discussion on how each of the cycles starts and argues that \u2018we are entitled to speak of necessity in the case of the cosmic cycle (as Aristotle does) as well as in that of the demonic circle\u2019 and, further, that \u2018although we are entitled to speak of necessity in both cases, we should carefully distinguish between the two cases, and indeed between two kinds of necessity\u2019 (267). Cosmic \u2018necessity\u2019 is absolute, whilst demonic \u2018Necessity\u2019 is hypothetical.\r\n\r\nIn \u2018Sin and moral responsibility in Empedocles\u2019 cosmic cycle\u2019, Catherine Osborne also gets stuck into the thorny issue of Empedoclean necessity. She rejects the kind of \u2018mechanical and deterministic\u2019 reading of Empedocles\u2019 cycle which, by imposing \u2018fixed periods between regular recurring events [\u2026] leave[s] little room for moral agency to have any significance\u2019 (283). Osborne worries that notions of sin and responsibility will be meaningless in a cosmos where acts of pollution and periods of punishment are predetermined. Using the illuminating parallel of Sophocles\u2019 Oedipus, Osborne argues that a distinction between necessity and prediction should be applied to Empedocles. Empedocles\u2019 daimones are moral agents who act voluntarily in a manner that has been predicted (but which they have promised to avoid) and thus, being responsible for their own predicament, they are punished according to the moral code upon which they have previously agreed. She canvasses a variety of possible readings for B115\u2019s \u2018oracle of necessity\u2019 and concludes that none of them diminishes the responsibility of the daimones or interferes with their free will. Her ultimate conclusion is that Empedocles intended to \u2018set the cosmic events within a moral structure, one in which the fall from unity was the effect of violence in heaven\u2019 (297). Osborne also offers an appendix on the Byzantine sScholia.\r\n\r\nAngelo Tonelli\u2019s \u2018Cosmogony is psychogony is ethics: some thoughts about Empedocles\u2019 fragments 17; 110; 115; 134 DK, and P. Strasb. Gr. Inv. 1665-1666D, VV. 1-9\u2032 is an intriguing attempt to draw parallels between Empedocles\u2019 \u2018initiation poems\u2019 and the \u2018oriental spiritual tradition\u2019. As the title suggests, Tonelli argues for the unity of physics and ethics in what he identifies as Empedocles\u2019 mysticism. He reaches the provocative conclusion that Empedocles\u2019 wise man longs for the triumph of Love even at the expense of his own dissolution qua individual into total unity. \u2018But this\u2019, Tonelli asserts, \u2018is not nihilism: this is psychocosmic mysticism\u2019 (330).\r\n\r\nDavid Sedley urges a radical rethinking of Empedocles\u2019 double zoogony in his \u2018Empedocles\u2019 life cycles\u2019. He argues against the reading that places Love\u2019s zoogony in a phase of increasing Love leading up to the Sphairos. Sedley points out that it would be odd for Empedocles to expend more energy \u2018accounting for the origin of life forms which he could do no more than conjecture to have existed in a remote part of cosmic history [\u2026] (since the sphairos has intervened to render them extinct), than he did on accounting for life as we know it\u2019 (332). He proposes an alternative reading whereby both parts of the double zoogony are offered as an explanation of life as we know it, i.e. \u2018Love\u2019s zoogony was itself located in our world\u2019 (341) and is not separated from us by the Sphairos. Sedley also makes a seductive suggestion regarding the double anthropogony: Love\u2019s anthropogony produces daimones (whom Sedley understands to be creatures of flesh and blood), whilst Strife\u2019s \u2018discordant anthropogony\u2019 (355) results in \u2018wretched race of men and women [\u2026] committed to the divisive sexual politics that Strife imposes upon them\u2019 (347).\r\n\r\nIn \u2018Empedocles\u2019 zoogony and embryology\u2019, Laura Gemelli Marciano too turns her thoughts to the double zoogony, reinstating the Sphairos between the twin acts of creation. She argues that Strife\u2019s zoogony is, in a sense, a continuation of the creative act of Love. For the creatures who owe their origin to Love are, in time, \u2018suffocated\u2019 by the total unity of the Sphairos (but still present within it) but are then, in a sense, reborn via the divisive power of Strife. Strife\u2019s zoogony is dependant on that of Love for \u2018he only frees little by little those beings that Aphrodite had first created and then suffocated\u2019 (381). Gemelli Marciano presents a particularly appealing case for reading Empedocles\u2019 double zoogony as \u2018repeated at a microcosmic level in the mechanism of the conception and development of the embryo\u2019 (383). Both zoogony and embryology describe conception followed by articulation. She closes with some thoughts of how this connection should inform our understanding of Empedocles\u2019 theory of the transmigration of souls.\r\n\r\nI can\u2019t help but feel well-disposed towards a book that includes the declaration \u2018The colour of the cover in this volume corresponds to that of blood, Empedoclean substance of thought\u2019 (407). Had the book\u2019s design been influenced by more prosaic concerns, its sheer wealth of stimulation, provocation and authority ensures that I would nevertheless recommend it to anyone who feels the slightest curiosity about Empedocles, perhaps the most curious of all the Pre-Socratics. ","republication_of":null,"online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/TxAm4obxbTupTry","translation_of":null,"new_edition_of":null,"is_catalog":0,"in_bibliography":0,"is_inactive":0,"notes":null,"doi_url":null,"book":{"id":317,"pubplace":"Patras","publisher":"Institut for Philosophical Research","series":"","volume":"","edition_no":"","valid_from":null,"valid_until":null}}},"article":null},"sort":["Empedocles' Life Cycles"]}