Ancient philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 1 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) 46

PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO faces and breasts on front and back (KRS 379) Most of these fortuitous organisms were fragile or sterile; only the Wttest structures survived to be the human and animal species we know Their Wtness to reproduce was a matter of chance, not design (Aristotle, Ph 198b29) Aristotle paid tribute to Empedocles for being the Wrst to grasp the important biological principle that diVerent parts of dissimilar living organisms might have homologous functions: e.g olives and eggs, leaves and feathers (Aristotle, GA 23 731a4) But he was contemptuous of his attempt to reduce teleology to chance, and for many centuries biologists followed Aristotle rather than Empedocles Empedocles had the last laugh when Darwin saluted him for ‘shadowing forth the principle of natural selection’.14 Empedocles employed his quartet of elements in giving an account of sense-perception, based on the principle that like is known by like In his poem PuriWcations he combined his physical theory with the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis.15 Sinners—divine or human—are punished when Strife casts their souls into diVerent kinds of creatures on land and sea A cycle of reincarnation held out a hope of eventual deiWcation for privileged classes of men: seers, bards, doctors, and princes (KRS 409) Empedocles, of course, had a claim to identify himself with all these professions In his writing, Empedocles moves seamlessly between an austerely mechanistic mode and a mystically religious one He sometimes uses divine names for his four elements (Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis) and identiWes his Love with the goddess Aphrodite, whom he celebrates in terms anticipating Schiller’s great ‘Ode to Joy’ (KRS 349) No doubt his own claim to divinity can be deXated in the same way as he demythologizes the Olympian gods But it caught the attention of posterity, especially in the legend of his death A woman called Pantheia, the story goes, given up for dead by the physicians, was miraculously restored to life by Empedocles To celebrate, he oVered a sacriWcial banquet to eighty guests in a rich man’s house at the foot of Etna When the other guests went to sleep, he heard his name called from heaven He hastened to the summit of the volcano, and then, in Milton’s words, 14 Appendix to 6th edn of The Origin of Species, quoted in A Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 80 15 See Ch below 23