The four elements: living beings or inert matter? Plato’s Timaeus against Empedocles’s On nature

Abstract. In this paper, I argue that Empedocles’s peculiar expression according to which the roots – living entities, each endowed with thought and desires – “are themselves” forces the reader to think of them not solely as the principles of generation, never born and destined never to perish, but also as the true being, in the sense that the many particular entities are only an aspect, an image, a form assumed by the roots. I then argue that in his Timaeus Plato implicitly opposes Empedocles by describing the four elements as generated, sensible, and corporeal: therefore, not as entities with life and thought or even the true being, but as contingent forms or images of necessity. In this way, Plato prevents Empedocles’s theories from developing into a tradition: no longer conceived as intelligent and living beings, in ancient physics the four elements become inert matter.