Studies how religious and ethical concerns are an integral and structuring part of the physical system of Empedocles.

The essays in this volume treat a wide variety of fundamental topics and problems in ancient Greek philosophy. The scope of the section on pre-Socratic thought ranges over the views which these thinkers have on such areas of concern as religion, natural philosophy and science, cosmic periods, the nature of elements, theory of names, the concept of plurality, and the philosophy of mind. The essays dealing with the Platonic dialogues examine with unusual care a great number of central themes and discuss them in considerable depth: problems in language and logic, myth, reason, hypothesis, eros, friendship, reason, morality, society, art, the nature of soul, and immortality. In addition, they offer fresh discussions on a number of basic morphological, methodological, and philological issues related to philosophical arguments and introduce new aspects for a critical reexamination of controversies surrounding the doctrines and the authenticity of certain Platonic works. The essays on the philosophy of Aristotle are closely reasoned analyses of such basic themes as the universality of the sensible, the nature of kinesis, the problem of future contingencies, the meaning of qualitative change, the doctrine of phantasia, the essence of intelligence, and the metaphysical foundations for the ethical life. The essays on post-Aristotelian developments in ancient philosophy offer challenging and well-documented discussions on topics in the history of ancient logic, categorical thought, the ethical doctrines of ancient Scepticism, epistemological issues in the physical theory of the Epicureans, and basic concepts in the metaphysics of the neo-platonists.

Offers the first complete reinterpretation of Empedocles – one of the founding figures of Western philosophy – since the publication of the Strasbourg papyrus in 1999 brought new fragments of his lost work to light.

The Poem of Empedocles is a completely new edition of the fragments of Empedocles, which presents the Greek text and a new verse translation on facing pages. Also included are the testimonia from Diels-Kranz (for the first time translated into English), and a very full selection of frangment contexts, much of it material which has never before been translated into any modern language. The fragments are presented in their original contexts, which makes possible a fresh reading of the full evidence for Empedocles' thought. In this edition Brad Inwood argues for a new view of the character of Empedocles' philosophical work. In the introduction he makes a sustained case for there being only one poem originally, rather than two as has usually been thought, and explores the philosophical implications of this thesis at length. He offers new interpretations of Empedocles' metaphysics, epistemology, religious philosophy, andcosmology, and relates the work of Empedocles to Aristotle's critique.