Empedocles: Neurophilosophy and Neurosciences- Prophecy and Reality

Abstract

Neurosciences are extended into a broad field, where the scientific observation and research join harmoniously the imagination, the intuition, the philosophy, the critic analysis, the enthusiasm and the skepticism, opening new horizons in the theoretic perspectives and offering new motivations for research, on the bases of an advanced multi-dimensional intellectuality. From the Era of Pre-Socratic philosophers, soul and mind have been the subject of continuous speculation, study, research and meditation [1]. Questions that the human being posed to himself, concerning the existence, the soul, the psychosomatic entity, the cognition, the knowledge of the world, and the perception of time and space used to exercise always an existential anxiety. Very frequently, human emotions have been the foci of insisting endeavors for right interpretation and detailed analysis. Reasonably, the importance of the mental activities and interior feelings on the psychosomatic homeostasis are subjects of inquiry from the Greek antiquity up to our Era [2]. Among the pre-Socratic philosophers Empedocles may be considered as the most proximate to Neurosciences. He was younger that Heraclitus [3] and older than Socrates, born in the city of Acragas (Agrigento, Sicily) one of the most prosperous and beautiful cities of the “Grecia Magna”, in 492 BC. We don’t know any detail of Empedocles’ life. Diogenes Laeertius’ records on Empedocles are intermixed with myths, stories and legends of contradictory character [4,5]. From all the records, we can conclude that Empedocles was philosopher, physician and priest, mystic and prophet, poet of a high talent, brilliant orator, man of exceptional knowledge, characterized by generosity and magnanimity, who attempted to associate philosophy with science. Empedocles writings are mainly summarized in two poems, written in hexameter verse [6]. One of them was entitled “On Nature” and the other “Purifications”. [7,8] The poem on Nature has an obvious cosmologic character, introducing at the same time the main principles of evolutional ontology. The other poems entitle “Purifications” has a strong religious character. From the two poems only 450 lines, in fragments, have been survived, which are strong enough for revieling the philosophical principles, the clarity of the mind, the enthusiastic character of the philosopher and the influences by Heraclitus [9] and Parmenides [10,11]. Some of Empedocles’ concepts may also be attributed to Anaximander and Pythagoras, while his methodology may be attributed to Anaxagoras. Empedocles endeavored to enter in the depths of the human soul in order to discover the interior power which motivates the emotions, the feelings and the social behavior of the human being. He tried to identify the main pivots of the emotional interactions. He insisted that Love and Strife are the ends of an axis, which regulates and controls all the spectrum of the human emotions. According to Empedocles there is not birth or coming into existence and death. There is only a connection or mixture and separation of four pure fundamental elements or “roots”, which are “the earth”, “the air”, “the fire” and “the water”. According to Aristotle these four elements, which have been traditional concepts in Greek physical theory [12], were mentioned first by Empedocles. The theory of the four fundamental elements or roots is not far from the scientific reality, since earth symbolizes the carbon (C), the basis of any organic substance, the water (H