THE GREAT CHARLATAN

Bertrand Russell treats Empedocles with great respect, if not so much by showering admiring epithets upon him, then by giving him a lot of space in his History of Western Philosophy. This is how he introduces him at the beginning of the Empedoclean Chapter (we are abridging Russell’s narrative):

The mixture of philosopher, prophet, man of science, and charlatan, which we found already in Pythagoras, was exemplified very completely in Empedocles. He was a younger contemporary of Parmenides, though his doctrine had in some ways more affinity with that of Heraclitus. He was a democratic Sicilian politician who at the same time claimed to be a god. In due course, he was banished, but he appears after banishment, to have preferred the career of a sage to that of an intriguing refugee. It seems probable that in youth he was more or less Orphic; that before his exile he combined politics and science; and that it was only in later life, as an exile, that he became a prophet.

His most important contribution to science was his discovery of air as a separate substance. This he proved by the observation that when a bucket is put upside down into water the water does not enter the bucket. He also discovered at least one example of centrifugal force: that if a cup of water is whirled around at the end of a string, the water does not come out. As regards astronomy, he knew that the moon shines by reflected light, but thought that this was also true of the sun. He said that light takes time to travel, but so little time that we cannot observe it. He was the founder of the Italian school of medicine. All this shows the scientific vigor of his time, which was not equaled in the later ages of Greece.

I shall not retell Russell’s account of Empedocles’ cosmology: some of this account has been made in the previous entries; for a fuller picture, I direct the reader to the proper sources of such information. But the ending of Russell’s chapter on Empedocles must be quoted here at the end of my own Empedoclean series:

The originality of Empedocles outside science consists in the doctrine of the four elements and in the use of the two principles of Love and Strife to explain change.

He rejected monism, and regarded the course of nature as regulated by chance and necessity rather than by purpose. In these respects his philosophy was more scientific than those of Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. In other respects, it is true, he acquiesced in current superstitions, but in these he was no worse than many more recent men of science.

This seems to me like a proper ending for our miniseries on Empedocles, and I shall leave it like this until the next phase of revisions.