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2 results

Reconstructing Empedocles' Thought
  • Chiara Ferella
  • Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • To understand Empedocles' thought, one must view his work as a unified whole of religion and physics. Only a few interpreters, however, recognise rebirth as a positive doctrine within Empedocles' physics and attempt to reconcile its details with the cosmological account. This study shows how rebirth underlies Empedocles' cosmic system, being a structuring principle of his physics. It reconstructs the proem to his physical poem and then shows that claims to disembodied existence, individual identity and personal survival of death(s) prove central to his physics; that knowledge of the cosmos is the path to escape rebirth; that purifications are essential to comprehending the world and changing one's being, and that the cosmic cycle, with its ethical import, is the ideal backdrop for Empedocles' doctrine of rebirth. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

  • Chapter 6 - The Pythagorean way of life and Pythagorean ethics

  • Edited by Carl A. Huffman, DePauw University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of Pythagoreanism
    Published online:
    05 May 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014, pp 131-148

  • Summary

    The ethical-religious dimension of ancient Pythagoreanism is complex and has a conservative side linked to tradition, but also a certain "otherness" in comparison to contemporary customs. There is almost universal agreement that the precepts known as acusmata ("things heard"), or symbola ("tokens", "passwords"), short maxims which were handed down orally and put into practice in everyday life, form the original nucleus of the bios pythagorikos. The author dwells in particular on precepts and practices concerning their relationship with the gods, the daimones, the dead, the family, the group and the outside world. The earliest sources consider silence to be the hallmark of the movement. Pythagoreans thought that after gods and daimones one should pay the greatest attention to parents. Friendship (philia) is the cement that holds the group together and is based on "harmonious equality" as defined by the Pythagoreans.