I'm not going to lie. I spent my free time on Thursday playing Civilization V on my computer instead of working on my presentation (Babylon for the win!). But I'm working on it now, so it's all good.
Empedocles "at-a-glance": Grade A narcissist with an ego the size of the Indian subcontinent. "I go about you, an immortal god, no longer mortal, honored among all, as it seems, wreathed with headbands and blooming garlands." To quote my fraternity brothers, his declaration is "hoish." Anyways, his philosophy seems pretty cool. My presentation will be over his epistemology so let's take a look at that.
The first relevant aphorism that I find in the reader is number 108, which reads, "A single sight [visual impression] comes from both [eyes]." While this is a short statement, a lot of Empedocles' epistemology can be derived from this aphorism. In its most basic form, this aphorism can be interpreted as, "What you see is what exists." You can only perceive what you see. This point can be taken further to mean, "If you are not perceiving something then it does not exist," but I don't think Empedocles means exactly that. It is true and obvious that if you are not seeing something, you cannot directly perceive the object (tautology! woooooo!), but the wider implication is that outside of our vision, our perception, objects might not exist. I think this is an interesting point that I will definitely look into for my presentation. A lot of the philosophers that I studied last semester in Modern European Philosophy covered this topic. There's a lot to read here.
The second area that I will focus on during my presentation is Empedocles' theory of knowledge. In aphorism 115, he says, "For by earth we see earth, by water, water, by Aither, divine Aither, and by fire, destructive fire, yearning by yearning, and strife by mournful strife." Actually, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Context: There are four main elements and two powers which control their formation and separation. The elements are Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. The two powers are Love and Strife. All things in the kosmos are formed through the elements and governed by the powers. So what Empedocles is saying in this aphorism is through the earth, air, fire, and water that is in our essence, we can come to observe the elements in the world. Empedocles says in aphorism 118, "For from these [the roots] (the classical elements) all things are joined and compounded, and by these they think and fell pleasure and pain." We have knowledge through the elements inside of us expressing their familiarity with the other forms of the elements.
So yeah. That's the initial prep. The next step is to take a look at the works of Hume, Berkely, and Reid to see if they have anything to say on the theory of knowledge.
-Andrew
Good start, Andrew. But I think you are inferring more from aphorism 108 than is warranted. It seems that 108 is simply a claim about what physical organs are involved in visual perceptions, and not a claim about what exists. Also, I don't think it's true and obvious that if you are not seeing something, you cannot directly perceive the object, for it's possible to directly perceive things with other sense organs, like smell, taste, hearing and touch. Or do you have a more technical meaning of "direct perception" in mind? Even if you do, I don't see how it would allow for direct perception only in the case of vision and not the other senses.
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