What did Empedocles believe in?
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Empedocles was a Greek philosopher who is best known for his belief that all matter was composed of four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. Some have considered him the inventor of rhetoric and the founder of the science of medicine in Italy.
Why does love and strife means based on Empedocles?
So Empedocles argued that the world is underpinned by love and strife. Love is the force that unites things, that brings them together. Love mixes and blends and combines. Strife is the counter-force that separates things out.
What is the idea presented by Empedocles about the first living human beings?
Empedocles was the first person in history to propose that today’s life on Earth arose from a process we could describe as natural selection. In On Nature, he pictured Earth in its early days populated by bizarre creatures – cattle with human heads, arms without shoulders, and all sorts of other monstrous creatures.

What is Empedocles theory of effluvia?
Empedocles. A famous ancient philosopher of the physical world. He is cited in the Meno in the context of Socrates’ definition of color, which Socrates bases on Empedocles’ concept of effluvia (the elements that enter through our sense organs).
What did Empedocles discover?

Empedocles discovered air as a separate substance. In his cosmology fire, air, water and earth mingle and separate under the compulsion of love and strife. He wrote a poetic treatise ‘On Nature’. It contained ideas that anticipated the ideas of evolution, the circulation of the blood, and atmospheric pressure.
What does nature consist of according to the Atomists?
The ancient Greek atomists theorized that nature consists of two fundamental principles: atom and void. Clusters of different shapes, arrangements, and positions give rise to the various macroscopic substances in the world.
What is love for Empedocles?
Empedocles | |
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Notable ideas | All things are made up of four elements: fire, air, earth and water Change and motion are due to the corporeal substances Love (Aphrodite) and Strife The sphere of Empedocles Theories about respiration (the clepsydra experiment) Emission theory of vision |
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What is the idea of Empedocles about matter?
Empedocles, a Greek philosopher and scientist who lived on the south coast of Sicily between 492 BCE and 432 BCE, proposed one of the first theories that attempted to describe the things around us. Empedocles argued that all matter was composed of four elements: fire, air, water, and earth.
Why was Lucretius poem on the nature of things important?
Lucretius’s task was to clearly state and fully develop these views in an attractive form; his work was an attempt to show through poetry that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws, without the need for the intervention of divine beings.
What is discrete in nature?
adjective. 1. Distinguished from others by nature or qualities: distinct, separate, several, various.
What does Lucretius say about nature?
Following Epicurus, Lucretius believed that change and growth in the universe come from the movement of atoms through the void. This movement is due to an innate motion of atoms. Rather than moving in a uniform, predetermined way, atoms move randomly, swerving as they fall through space.
What did Lucretius discover?
Lucretius was one of the first persons to discover that everything in this universe, ranging from planets and stars to mountains, decay. Centuries before the second law of thermodynamics, he predicted that one day “the walls of the sky will be stormed on every side, and will collapse into a crumbling ruin …