Empedocles

Abstract

This chapter discusses the Empedocles was a native of Acragas in Sicily, a Doric colony founded on the south coast of the island in the sixth century which soon grew to rival Syracuse in its prosperity. The common acceptance of additions and subtractions as births and deaths should consequently be understood as merely ‘names’ mistakenly used in human speech. As a basic principle it foreshadows contemporary assumptions in a number of areas, for example that the main ingredients of living things are the elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, that language, literature and mathematics can be expressed as encoded variations of the binary numbers zero and one, and that the genetic range of species is reducible to an arrangement of the four basic letters of the DNA strings. Empedocles, earth, air, fire and water assimilate and separate in the plenum, shifting together and moving apart in continually changing arrangements and rearrangements, while each keeps its character inviolate.

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