![]() However, various thinkers who are included in Diels’s handbook, such as Alcmaeon, Parmenides, Hippo, Menestor, Philolaus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Diogenes of Apollonia, are also interested in the study of human beings, animals, and plants. 209.Workshop Early Greek Philosophy and Life SciencesĮarly Greek philosophy is normally interpreted as focusing on the creation and workings of the cosmos. (8) But this, too, appears to me to be obvious, that it is both great, and mighty, and eternal, and undying, and of great knowledge. (7) And this itself is an eternal and undying body, but of those things some come into being and some pass away. At the same time, they all live, and see, and hear by the same thing, and they all have their intelligence from the same source. (6) Since, then, differentiation is multiform, living creatures are multiform and many, and they are like one another neither in appearance nor in intelligence, because of the multitude of differentiations. At the same time, it is not possible for any of the things which are differentiated to be exactly like one another till they all once more become the same. And this warmth is not alike in any two kinds of living creatures, nor, for the matter of that, in any two men but it does not differ much, only so far as is compatible with their being alike. And the soul of all living things is the same, namely, air warmer than that outside us and in which we are, but much colder than that near the sun. For it undergoes many transformations, warmer and colder, drier and moister, more stable and in swifter motion, and it has many other differentiations in it, and an infinite number of colours and savours. Yet no single thing partakes in it just in the same way as another but there are many modes both of air and of intelligence. For this very thing I hold to be a god, and to reach everywhere, and to dispose everything, and to be in everything and there is not anything which does not partake in it. (5) And my view is, that that which has intelligence is what men call air, and that all things have their course steered by it, and that it has power over all things. Men and all other animals live upon air by breathing it, and this is their soul and their intelligence, as will be clearly shown in this work while, when this is taken away, they die, and their intelligence fails. (4) And, further, there are still the following great proofs. ![]() And any one who cares to reflect will find that everything else is disposed in the best possible manner. (3) For it would not be possible for it without intelligence to be so divided, as to keep the measures of all things, of winter and summer, of day and night, of rains and winds and fair weather. But all these things arise from the same thing they are differentiated and take different forms at different times, and return again to the same thing. ![]() Neither could a plant grow out of the earth, nor any animal nor anything else come into being unless things were composed in such a way as to be the same. And this is obvious for, if the things which are now in this world-earth, and water, and air and fire, and the other things which we see existing in this world-if any one of these things, I say, were different from any other, different, that is, by having a substance peculiar to itself and if it were not the same thing that is often changed and differentiated, then things could not in any way mix with one another, nor could they do one another good or harm. (2) My view is, to sum it all up, that all things are differentiations of the same thing, and are the same thing. (1) In the beginning any discourse, it seems to me that one should make one's starting-point something indisputable, and one's expression simple and dignified. I give them as they are arranged by Diels: ![]() The work of Diogenes seems to have been preserved in the Academy practically all the fairly extensive fragments which we still have are derived from Simplicius.
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