The philosophy of Empedocles remains the subject of widely diverging interpretations. This is so despite the discovery of important new evidence, which, far from dousing old debates, has instead further inflamed them. The following account seeks to chart the impact of the new material on a number of these still-open questions, without, however, ignoring significant contributions made to scholarship before it. Because the assessment of this material is still in its early days, the debate on many points may yet shift in one or the other direction.

The New Evidence

Notwithstanding the addition of a few elements to the corpus since Diels's edition, the study of Empedocles truly entered a new era in 1999 with the publication, by Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi, of the Strasburg papyrus of Empedocles. The papyrus, assembled from numerous smaller pieces, consists of four larger sections, called by the editors sections a...