The three great philosophical poems of the Victorian period, Tennyson's In Memoriam, Arnold's
Empedocles, and Browning's Bishop Blougram's Apology, are all meditations on religious and philosophical doubt, and to this canon one can add, as an appendix, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, the collected poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, and Pater's Marius the Epicurean.
Since
Empedocles claimed that four elements--earth, water, fire, and air--organize the universe through the two basic forces of love and strife/hatred, or the centripetal and centrifugal power functioning among them, the number "four" has often symbolized unification and fragmentation simultaneously in the history of Western arts.
Empedocles of Acragas, who lived during the time of Hippocrates, had a theory concerning disease and its afflictions.
Empedocles," and "Obermann Once More," possesses "a prescriptive right to be considered a connoisseur in the poetry of pessimism" (5).
The concept of efficient cause did not emerge until the time of
Empedocles, who postulated two motive forces, Love (mahabbah) and Strife (ghalabah), to account for the various changes observed everywhere in the universe.
It was the philosopher and scientist
Empedocles (c493-433 BC) who proposed that the universe was composed of four elements - fire, air, earth and water.
Evening may therefore be called, 'the old age of the day,' and old age, 'the evening of life,' or, in the phrase of
Empedocles, 'life's setting sun.
Marie Helene Huet refers to the lost text of
Empedocles that first de scribed how women, although lacking the power to initiate conception, once impregnated, have the power to deform their progeny:
6) Parmenides6 and the influential Sicilian,
Empedocles,1 however, thought that the soul was seated in the thorax or the blood surrounding the heart.
The philosopher-poet
Empedocles was thought to have jumped into the crater of Mount Etna.
Sauve Meyer suggests that Aristotle especially has these predecessors in mind: Democritus,
Empedocles, and Anaxagoras (Physics II 8; de Generatione Animalium V 8, 789b2-7; Metaphysics I 4, 985a18-21; de Generatione Animalium V 1, 778b7-10; de Partibus Animalium I 1, 640b4-17) (Sauve Meyer 1992, 792n2).
the Greek philosopher
Empedocles urged his student Pausanias not just to perceive but to perceive his own perceiving and so enter a state of alertness he called metis.
