Commentary

This fragment, reported by Aristotle, states that thought is located in the blood surrounding the heart, a physiological account of cognition that reflects the four-root theory. Blood, as a mixture of the elements in a particular proportion, is taken to be the seat of understanding. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield note that Aristotle cites the view in his own discussion of thought and criticises it for failing to distinguish the physical medium from the faculty. Daniel Graham argues that the physiology of thought in Empedocles follows from his account of mixture, so that cognition depends on the right proportion of the roots. Richard Wright comments that the fragment shows how the poem extended its cosmology into the study of the body. Jean Bollack examines the medical and physiological background of the passage, which drew on Sicilian medicine. The English is an approximation of Aristotle's paraphrase, and the context in De Anima should be consulted before quotation.