Waylaid on the Road to Riches

Empedocles! What Kind of a Name is That?

As our knowledgeable friends Laura and Mike would tell you, it's a Greek name. A very old Greek name. Much older than 'Nick' or 'Tony' or any of other of the names you'd likely encounter when meeting Greeks today.

Fire As Mike and Laura suggest, Empedocles was a very influential thinker. His notion of the four elements was considered cutting-edge scientific theory for centuries after his death, and underpins the related theory of the four humours. The general theory is that all of creation, all physical matter, is comprised of four basic elements: air, water, earth and fire. Each element results from the combination of two basic attributes, hotness/coldness and moistness/dryness. Or in the words of a revered classical author:

Every one of these elements hath two coupled qualities, which constitute the species or nature of it. Yet these qualities by themselves cannot be elements; for qualities are void of body, and of things incorporeal things corporeal cannot be made. It follows therefore necessarily that every element is a body and a simple-body, and such a one as hath actually in it, in the highest degree, these qualities: heat, cold, moisture and dryness. To which we reply, "Bah?"

Here's an easier rule of thumb:

earth: dry and cold
water: moist and cold
air: moist and hot
fire: dry and hot

Because the elements are made up of these opposing qualities (moist/heat, hot/cold), they are constantly at war, creating the ever-changing, ever-conflicting cosmos that we live in.

Over the years, hot-shot thinkers developed a sort of correspondence between this vision of the cosmos and the cosmos 'within'--that is, our individual human bodies. Like the greater span of creation, each of our bodies was seen as made up four elements, defined in anatomy as the 'humours.' These humours were thought of as bodily fluids which are to the human body what the elements are to the common matter of the earth. Thus, each element corresponds to one of these basic bodily humours:

Element	Humour	Common Quality
Earth	Melancholy	Cold and Dry
Water	Phlegm	Cold and Moist
Air	Blood	Hot and Moist
Fire	Choler	Hot and Dry

Think on this: if you do your Shakespeare reading (which I have no doubt you ALL have), you still see this basic notion of four basic elements bandied about as common knowledge. That's a full 1900 years or so after Empedocles lived!

The sad thing is, he was completely wrong. So much for the wisdom of the ages.

Sunburst The other interesting fact about Empedocles is that he is said to have committed suicide by leaping into the volcano Etna. I got your hot and dry right here, Empedocles!!!

To learn more about Empedocles, visit these festive sites:

J.C. Evans of George Mason University has kindly provided a brief biography of Empedocles.
To view Empedocles' work within the context of the broader history of science, visit the site for Early Atomic Understanding.
To read about Empedocles' staltwart effort in a soccer game pitting classical philosophers against modern era philosophers, check out a transcript of Monty Python's Philospher's Soccer Match.

Special thanks to Karen Shader for these lovely illustrations. You can see more of her work at her Karen Shader Designs.