Empedocles, a Greek philosopher of Agrigentum, in Sicily, lived about 450 B.C. So great was the estimation in which he was held by his fellow-citizens as a physician, a friend of the gods, a predictor of futurity, and a magician, that they are said to have offered him the sovereignty. But being an enemy of tyranny, he declined it, and was the means of delivering the community from the dominion of the aristocracy, and bringing in a democracy. There was a tradition that he threw himself into the crater of Etna in order that his sudden disappearance might beget a belief in his divine origin; this, however, can only be regarded as a mere fable, like the story told by Lucian, that Etna threw out the sandals of the vain philosopher, and thus destroyed the popular belief in his divinity. In Matthew Arnold's poem, Empedocles on Etna, the philosopher is represented as superior to vanity and superstition, but moody and out of sympathy with his contemporaries.
In Empedocles philosophic thought is bound up with poetry and myth even more closely than in Parmenides (q.v.). His general point of view is determined by the influence of the Eleatic school upon the physical theories of the Ionic philosophers. He assumed four primitive independent substances—air, water, fire, and earth, which he designates often by the mythical names Zeus, Hera, &c. These four elements, as they were called, kept their place till modern chemistry dislodged them. Along with material elements he affirmed the existence of two moving and operating powers, love and hate, or affinity and antipathy, the first as the uniting principle, the second as the separating. The contrast between matter and power, or force, is thus brought out more strongly by Empedocles than by previous philosophers. His theory of the universe seems to assume a gradual development of the perfect out of the imperfect, and a periodical return of things to the elemental state, in order to be again separated, and a new world of phenomena formed. Of his opinions on special phenomena may be mentioned his doctrine of emanations, by which, in connection with the maxim that like is known only by like, he thought to explain the nature of perception by the senses. He attempted to give a moral application to the old doctrine of the transmigration of souls, his views of which resembled those of Pythagoras. The fragments of Empedocles have been edited by Sturz (1805), Karsten (1838), and Stein (1852). See monographs by Lommatsch (1830), Raynaud (1848), and Gladisch (1858).