Weekly Reading: Cosmology in Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles

    On reading the book "A History of Western Philosophy", I'm at the part of ancient Greek philosophers.
    Heraclitus ( Ἡράκλειτος) talks about the world in an perspective that everything is changing all the time. He viewed strife as a power of changing, not necessarily an evil deed, and thus war "is the father of all and king of all". To think about the construction of the cosmos, he believes that fire is the primordial element, out of which everything comes into being.
    However, Parmenides (Παρμενίδης) stressed that the cosmos is in essential perpetual with no change. He takes the words in human languages as such an instance, saying that the name of a person is always associated with him, whenever before, during or after his life. However, Bertrand Russell, the author of the book, attacked this theory by proposing that for those who never meet the person, what comes to their mind is their illusion or image based on how they read or hear about him, which is conspicuously not identical to what he really is in the minds of his friends. But after all, Parmenides' theory is partially true in the sense of quantum physics, since scientists can always find the unchangeable part of any object in a smaller and smaller scale, i.e. from Atom to Proton to Hadron. Although this process has not reached its final goal of find the unchangeable kernel, it's widely believed that the constituent of such a property with respect to chemical reactions must exist.
    Finally, Empedocles ( Ἐμπεδοκλῆς) combines the theory of cosmology of all the previous philosophers together as a concession. In his theory, the cosmos is made from four elements -- fire, water, air and earth. There are also two powers, Love and Strife, performing the construction and destruction of objects respectively. The two kind of reactions happens in order and consist an infinite cycle. Thus all compound things are temporary and destructible, while only those four elements remains forever. Due to Empedocles, there is a golden age when the power of Love totally supersedes that of Strife. Then people at this era would worship only the Cyprian Aphrodite, who is the Goddess of Love.