The Eye of Empedocles

Like the other prisocratics, empedocles was genuinely fascinated by the physical world around him. In one complicated fragment, the eye is said to be fashioned by aphrodite and put together very much like a lantern, which shields a fire from the wind. This principle that in sensation, only like can affect like is one we will revisit when we get to aristotle's theory of the soul. Next time, i'll be interviewing one of the world's leading scholars of presocratic thought as a fitting culmination to the episodes on the presocratic so far.