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Patricia Curd 7 S Where Are Love and Strife? Incorporeality in Empedocles I. The Problem Empedocles insists that the forces of Love and Strife are necessary for the mixtures and separations that produce the visible cosmos (B17; esp. lines 19–20); he also seems to give them distinct and different spatial locations in the different stages of the cycles between their triumphs (B35, B36). If we analyze the local mixtures that constitute sensible things, we will find various ratios of earth, water, air, and fire (B73, B98), but Love (and, apparently Strife) cannot be discovered by this kind of empirical analysis, and this is not because they are too small to be seen (B17.25). So we face the question : where are Love and Strife? To answer the “where” question, we need to answer the “what” question first: what are Love and Strife? A common (but not universal) view is that they are body-like elements, metaphysically equal to the four roots, earth, water, air, and fire, and also of a similar corporeal nature.1 But why suppose that Love and Strife are bodily? This paper argues that, while Love and Strife indeed share foundational metaphysical status with the roots, they are not material, and they 113 1. See, for instance, Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 32 and KR, 330 (no discussion of the question appears in the corresponding chapter—rewritten by Schofield—in KRS). McKirahan , Philosophy before Socrates (hereafter PBS), 260–61, is agnostic on the question, but seems to think that they are matter-like, because of the spatially-tinged language Empedocles uses to describe their action and because they occupy different places in the universe at different times. Sedley, Creationism, accepts the materiality of Love and Strife. Brad Inwood, David Sedley , and Martha Nussbaum have affirmed their acceptance of this view in the discussion on the occasion of my presentation of “Divinity, Intelligibility, and Human Understanding in Presocratic Thought.” See also Nussbaum, “ΨΥΧΗ in Heraclitus, I and II.” 114  Patricia Curd have no spatial locations. This is not a new interpretation. M. R. Wright claims that Love and Strife are not material, citing (among other evidence) Empedocles’s insistence that we must grasp them with nous rather than through perception (as in B21), and Catherine Osborne also denies that they are corporeal. I have made similar claims about Love and Strife in several places. Nevertheless, there are those who find these claims obviously false. Formulating and defending the non-corporeal interpretation involves challenging some long-held views about early Greek thought, as well as attempting to clarify some remarkably murky notions. An influential view maintains that Love and Strife must be bodies or stuffs because the Greek thinkers before Plato had no clear conception of immateriality and could conceive no existence other than bodily nature. If this is true, Empedocles could not have treated Love and Strife as incorporeal forces. Here are six claims that I think are true, each of which is incompatible with the corporealist view. 1. Xenophanes’s god does not have a body, and it is non-material. 2. Although the logos in Heraclitus is signified by fire, the logos itself is not to be identified with a material thing, nor is whatever it is in us that is our capacity to understand the logos. 3.  Parmenides’s what-is (to eon) is not a sphere (solid or otherwise); indeed, to qualify as a genuine being on Parmenidean grounds, something need not be corporeal at all. 4.  Parmenides does not think that thought (the use of noos or our capacity to noein) or its object are to be identified with body (except accidentally). The proper use of noos is not limited to sensory experience. 5. Anaxagoras’s Nous is not corporeal. 6. For Empedocles, Love and Strife are immaterial forces. What these claims share is the idea that there are some basic things in Presocratic philosophy that are not corporeal, or as I prefer to say, are not stuffs. There are two different versions of corporealism that I wish to challenge. The first is that the forces of change and motion in Presocratic theories are corporeal. The second is that mind or understanding and its objects are to be understood as corporeal processes and things.2 2. The chronological range here is from Xenophanes through the later Presocratics, including the Eleatics Zeno and Melissus, as well as Anaxagoras and Empedocles. In this story, [3.141.35.60] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 03:15 GMT...

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