Ancient philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 1 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) 43

PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO These and other similar arguments of Zeno assume that distances and motions are inWnitely divisible His arguments have been dismissed by some philosophers as ingenious but sophistical paradoxes Others have admired them greatly: Bertrand Russell, for instance, claimed that they provided the basis of the nineteenth-century mathematical renaissance of Weierstrass and Cantor.12 Aristotle, who preserved Zeno’s puzzles for us, claimed to disarm them, and to re-establish the possibility of motion, by distinguishing between two forms of inWnity: actual inWnity and potential inWnity.13 But it was not for many centuries that the issues raised by Zeno were given solutions that satisWed both philosophers and mathematicians Empedocles The most Xamboyant of the early philosophers of Greek Italy was Empedocles, who Xourished in the middle of the Wfth century He was a native of Acragas, the town on the south coast of Sicily which is now Agrigento The town’s port today bears the name Porto Empedocle, but this testiWes not to an enduring veneration of the philosopher, but to the Risorgimento’s passion for renaming sites in honour of Italy’s past glories Empedocles came of an aristocratic family which owned a stud of prizewinning horses In politics, however, he is reputed to have been a democrat; he is said to have foiled a plot to turn the city into a dictatorship The grateful citizens, the story goes on, oVered to make him king, but he refused the oYce, preferring his frugal life as a physician and counsellor (D.L 63) If free of ambition, however, he was not devoid of vanity, and in one of his poems he boasts that wherever he goes men and women throng to him for advice and healing He claimed to possess drugs to ward oV old age, and to know spells to control the weather In the same poem he frankly professed himself to have achieved divine status (D.L 66) DiVerent biographical traditions, not all chronologically possible, make Empedocles a pupil of Pythagoras, of Xenophanes, and of Parmenides Certainly he imitated Parmenides by writing a hexameter poem On Nature; this poem, dedicated to his friend Pausanias, contained about 2,000 lines, of which we possess about a Wfth He also wrote a religious poem, PuriWcations, 12 The Principles of Mathematics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1903), 347 20 13 See Ch below