Empedocles

Empedocles wrote his philosophy partly in reaction against, and partly in support of, the ideas of Parmenides. Empedocles agreed that the basic nature of the universe was changeless, but he allowed for a changing arrangement of the changeless building blocks of the universe. Thus he is often seen as the first thinker to state the concept of elements, from which we get our modern idea of chemistry. Yale’s Professor Brumbaugh writes:

To account for change, without assuming that “something comes from nothing,” he introduced the idea of a plurality of “elements,” which mix in different ratios but themselves remain unchanged. However, both the form and content of his poetry suggest that Empedocles was more interested in interpreting the vivid world of our sense than in finding some other reality behind appearance. He had an imagination able to combine the most divergent notions - so much so that many later readers have been unable to appreciate the originality of his work. Those of his ideas that were most philosophically influential were his notion of a plurality of “elements” ...

Brumbaugh goes on to describe one possible way to interpret the murky texts of Empedocles:

One can deny that there is any deep-hidden reality underlying appearance and argue that truth is to be found in close observation of what we can see or touch or imagine vividly. Someone who takes this standpoint will be less trustful of appeals to to mysterious “realities,” to highly abstract arguments, than he will be to more vivid items of experience.

If this is, in fact, what Empedocles thought, then he not only anticipated the modern chemical system of elements, but he may also have anticipated several other philosophical schools: phenomenology, epiphenomenology, and the radical empiricism of Hume and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.