Empedocles Research Paper

Empedocles is a widely known Greek in the world of philosophy. He became famous for his theories, his works on nature and on his wild antics he would preform and preach about thinking that he was a God. Everyone had an opinion about Empedocles, whether as a genious or a kook. Aristotle hailed empedocles as the inventor of the rhetoric. Galen coined him as the founder of Italian medecine. Lucretius admired his hexametric poetry.2 "He has been regarded variously as a materialist physicist, a shamanic magician, a mystical theologian, a healer, a democratic politician, a living god, and a fraud." (Campbell, 2005) Empedocles was born in 492 BC in Acagras of Sicily. He came from a rich, important, aristocratic family. His father was a Meton, and his grandfather, also named Empedocles, is reported to have been victorious in horse-racing at the Olmpic Games in 496 BC. 1 Empedocles was a diciple of the Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides. 4 He followed Pythagoas' theories in ethics and psychology. 1 He also took knowledge from Heracleitus, and further develope his love and strife theory. The only writings that remain
His theory is basically a predecessor of Darwin's natural selection. First of all, he believed that all individual limbs and organs were produced from the earth. They would then slowly combine into different creatures due to the force of love. They would produce double fronted creatures, hermaphrodites, ox-faced man creatures, man-faced ox creatures and all sorts of random hybrid creatures. Aristotle explains it later in the Physics and Simplicius eplains it in more detailin his commentary on the Physics. So the theory is that the creatures wrongly assembled would die off, and those put together from homogeneous limbs would survive and slwly evolve to be the species they are today. All the different organisms in nature are born in one big burst at the begginning and are whittled down to those we see