EMPÉDOCLES, ARISTÓTELES E OS ELEMENTOS

Abstract

We want to raise some issues about the Aristotelian thesis of Empedocles' materialism based from the idea of element. The term "element" does not appear in the poem, so the first question is whether it really makes sense to speak of "elements" in the physics of Empedocles. I Observe, in parallel, that the idea of element has at least two possible readings, and both can be found in the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics: a reading considering time, which we find in its definition (983b 6-11), and another reading considering space appearing in the presentation of atomistic philosophy which makes an analogy with the letters of the alphabet (985b 15-19). This also appears in another treatise, De generatione et Corruptione (315b9-15), in which the interlocutors of Aristotle are italics thinkers -- and especially Empedocles and the atomists. Aristotle criticises Empedocles' disavoyment on the reality of generation and corruption, for the latter says that there is neither birth nor death, but only mixing and krasis (DK 31 B8). Aristotle based his criticism on a conception of subsistence or not of the essence (οá½ÏƒÎ¯Î±). Besides the changes of qualitative, quantitative and spatial order, which can be explained according to the theories of differences in elemental composition of the atomists, Aristotle also requires an understanding of a more radical change in the way when a whole body ceases to be what it was or comes to be something he was not. At this sight, Empedocles would be, for Aristotle, a thinker who differs little from atomistic. For the Atomists, and Empedocles, as well as to all the Eleatics, there is really not generation and corruption.