Empedocles was from Acagras in Sicily. He was a poet and philosopher. He was one of the most significant Presocratics—philosophers who worked before Socrates—and a poet of extraordinary talent who had a significant impact on later poets like Lucretius. There are more than 150 fragments of his writings on Nature and Purifications.
He has been referred to as a living god, a shaman, a magician, a theologian, a healer, a democratic politician, a materialist physician, and a fraud, among other things.
One of the oldest theories of particle physics, the four-element theory of matter (earth, air, fire, and water) was developed by him and seems to be intended to save the phenomenal world from the static monism of Parmenides. In Empedocles' overview, two personified cosmic forces, Love and Strife, engage in an ongoing struggle for dominance within an everlasting cycle of change, development, and decay.
Empedocles was a Pythagorean in Psychology and Ethics. Therefore, he believed in soul reincarnation and was also a vegetarian. He claims to be a daimôn, a divine or potentially divine being, who, after being exiled from the immortal gods for "three times countless years" for the sin of eating meat, and forced to undergo successive reincarnations in a purifying journey through the various orders of nature and elements of the cosmos, has now attained the most perfect of human states and will be reborn as an immortal, has now attained the most perfect of human states.
Early after 445 BC, he travelled to Italy and arrived in the
village of Thurii, Lucania. He then travelled through the Peloponnese before
arriving at Olympia around 440 BC. At that year's Olympic games, his songs were
performed. Pausanias the son of Anchitos, a juvenile companion, accompanied him
on his journeys. The most plausible theory among the numerous that surround his
demise is that he passed away after a feast in the Peloponnese.
Empedocles was undoubtedly credited with a lot of
"firsts". Galen recognized him as the father of the science of
medicine in Italy, whereas Aristotle claimed to have invented rhetoric after
him. However, he is most known for his conviction that all matter is made up of
the four elements fire, air, water, and earth.
At order to challenge the beliefs of the Eleatic School, one
of the most influential pre-Socratic schools of Greek philosophy, which had
been founded by Parmenides in Elea in southern Italy, he proposed the
four-element hypothesis. This school's underlying tenet was that all that
appears to exist is actually just one single everlasting reality, according to
Zeno of Elea.
We should also draw attention to a crucial aspect of the
idea. It attempted to explain the myriad of complexity visible in the world as
the result of a select few basic underlying qualities, much like Pythagoras'
theories. Even if we no longer follow Empedocles' idea of the four
elements, we continue to search for straightforward mathematical solutions to
the complicated phenomena that surround us.
Empedocles lacked any experimental support for his four-element theory. He did, however, base several other scientific theories on experiment, and he used experiment to demonstrate that air existed and was not inert space. He used a clepsydra, a container having holes at the bottom and top, to do this. Empedocles saw that the vessel filled with water as he submerged the bottom hole in water. However, if he placed his finger over the top hole, water would not enter the bottom hole; instead, it would enter once he withdrew his finger. The air in the container, as Empedocles rightly inferred, kept the water from entering. Empedocles assumed that light had a fixed speed, only on the basis of logic and not any experimental proof.
It is incredible, how many of Empedocles' theories have shown to be accurate. He also created a primitive evolutionary theory based on the survival of the fittest in addition to his belief in the limited velocity of light. Along with a theory of constant proportions in chemical processes, he also had a version of the law of conservation of energy. Even if his theories had little impact on the advancement of research, they appear pretty remarkable in the context of what we currently know about science.