Volume 9, Issue 1

The studies of Empedocles have made headway in showing that Empedocles postulated a double zoogony. Whereas this has been traditionally related to the hypothesis of two worlds per cycle, some Empedoclean fragments provide evidence for a double zoogony in a cosmic cycle with one world. How can we reconcile the hypothesis of two zoogonies with the assumption of a unique world? Whereas there have been attempts to address this question by retaining the traditional idea of two opposite zoogonic periods or phases, I contend that Empedocles’ fragments invite us to a reconsideration of his notion of a double birth and death of mortal beings.

Empedocles’ B100 contains an analogy between a girl handling a clepsydra and respiration. This article argues that proposals to establish Love (Bollack 1965, Gheerbrant 2017) or Persephone (Rashed 2008) as the girl’s respiratory equivalent are rendered unlikely by differences between their respective causal roles. Rather than her gender, this article emphasises the importance of the girl’s age: Empedocles required a playful child to handle the clepsydra. This child’s play results in the extra phase of submerging the clepsydra while the upper vent is open, which Empedocles needed to form a parallel for the first static phase of respiration.

One puzzling feature of Plato’s Republic is the First City or ‘city of pigs’. Socrates praises the First City as a “true”, “healthy” city, yet Plato abandons it with little explanation. I argue that the problem is not a political failing, as most previous readings have proposed: the First City is a viable political arrangement, where one can live a deeply Socratic lifestyle. But the First City has a psychological corollary, that the soul is simple rather than tripartite. Plato sees this ‘First Soul’ as an inaccurate model of moral psychology, and so rejects it, along with its political analogue.

I argue that in Plato’s Parmenides 141 a 6– c 4, things in time come to be simultaneously older and younger than themselves because a thing’s past and present selves are both real. As a result, whatever temporal relation is predicated of any of these past and present selves is true of the thing in question. Unlike other interpretations, this reading neither assumes that things in time have to replace their parts, nor that time is circular. I conclude that the passage is committed to a conception of the ongoing present and a rejection of presentism and endurantism in favour of a growing universe theory and perdurantism.

In this paper, I argue that Plato conceives self-motion as non-spatial in Laws X. I demonstrate this by focusing on the textual evidence and by refuting interpretations according to which self-motion either is a specific type of spatial motion (e. g. circular motion) or is said to require space as a necessary condition for its occurrence. Moreover, I show that this non-spatial understanding differs from the identification of the soul’s motion with locomotion in the Timaeus . Consequently, I provide an explanation for this difference between the Timaeus and Laws X by considering developmentalist and contextualist viewpoints.

I reconstruct Aristotle’s explanation for why and how birds are capable of natural flight. For Aristotle, air is a markedly different external resting point in comparison with water and earth, and nature has designed birds so as to take advantage of the unique way in which air affects the inequality between (a) the pushing downward, that is, the downward force and (b) the resistance. My discussion sheds some light on Aristotle’s anticipation of some aspects of modern fluid dynamics and aerodynamics.