Rose Cherubin (George Mason University)
Commentators beginning with Aristotle and Plato described many fifth-century inquirers, including Empedocles and Philolaus, as phusikoi or investigators of phusis. Empedocles and Philolaus both used forms of ‘phusis’ and ‘phuo’ to speak of at least some of the subject of their accounts of what is and of what is right or appropriate. It is not evident that the senses in which each used these terms, nor even the references of the terms, consistently fit the ways in which Aristotle and Plato and their contemporaries used them, especially as concern matters of purpose, direction, and order. This may suggest, I will show, part of why Plato’s Socrates suggests that none of his predecessors provided an account of why it might be right for what is to be as it is (Phaedo 96a-99d); and may suggest part of why Aristotle’s Metaphysics A finds the work of Empedocles and Philolaus to be deficient with regard to final causes in connection with growth and change.
I propose to examine uses of the terms ‘phusis’ and ‘phuo’ in the fragments of Empedocles and Philolaus. I will look in particular at the ways in which these terms were associated with notions of order; and especially at whether and in what ways the discussions of order in either thinker invoke purposes, goals, directions, notions of right or good, or hierarchies. By ‘hierarchies’ I mean rankings of things (e.g. plants versus animals, non-humans versus humans, kinds of plant, kinds of animal, groups of humans, etc); or of different stages of change or development of things or of systems of things. Rankings may invoke goodness, justice, level of bodily or other complexity, capacities for something, fitness to rule, or something else.
Elucidating the semantic fields and applications of ‘phusis’ and ‘phuo’ in Empedocles and Philolaus should illuminate the ranges of senses for these terms in the fifth century BCE, as well as the range of roles they played in pre-Platonic philosophy. The work of the two thinkers selected gives some indication of the breadth of those ranges and roles. This will, I hope, help us understand better not only the range and possibilities of senses and associations of ‘phusis’ and ‘phuo’ as these changed over time, but also the conceptual frameworks (in their differences and similarities to our own) through which early Greek inquirers worked to understand what is, and its relationship to what is appropriate or right.