The world is configured in ways that seem systematically hospitable to life forms, especially the human race. Is this the outcome of divine planning or simply of the laws of physics? Ancient Greeks and Romans famously disagreed on whether the cosmos was the product of design or accident. In this book, David Sedley examines this question and illuminates new historical perspectives on the pantheon of thinkers who laid the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Versions of what we call the (...) "creationist" option were widely favored by the major thinkers of classical antiquity, including Plato, whose ideas on the subject prepared the ground for Aristotle's celebrated teleology. But Aristotle aligned himself with the anti-creationist lobby, whose most militant members—the atomists—sought to show how a world just like ours would form inevitably by sheer accident, given only the infinity of space and matter. This stimulating study explores seven major thinkers and philosophical movements enmeshed in the debate: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the atomists, Aristotle, and the Stoics. (shrink)

This article aims at reconstructing the most damaged part of the Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles (fragment f-d), by taking into account all the parameters at our disposal: palaeography, metre and, of course, content. According to this attempt, Empedocles would be describing the very moment in the phase of increasing Strife when the whole-natured creatures (the ολοφυ) were split into male and female beings. Thus, the first part of the fragment becomes very similar, in its content, to fr. 62 D.-K. and (...) to Plato's parody of Empedocles in Aristophanes' myth in the Symposium , while its second part emerges as containing new details of the process by which double creatures were split into two. If this reconstruction is accepted, its implication will be that Aetius' presentation of Empedocles' cosmic cycle as a fourfold continuous process is deeply inadequate. (shrink)