Three Minute Philosophy - Empedocles

The pre-Socratic philosophers are a strange bunch. On the one hand, their ideas about the nature of reality must strike most of us as just plain weird. Everything is made of air or water? The fundamental constituents of the universe are love and strife? No, it's number? What?

On the other hand, what else can you expect from really smart people who didn't have the benefit of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of almost three millennia that they were the first to contribute to?

But there are a few cases, like Empedocles, in which, while he was still wrong, he came so tantalizingly close to the right answer (or to what the right answer would sort of look like), that even though he threw himself into a scorching volcano to prove he was a god, I can't help but take off my hat to him and introduce you to his thinking in a fun little three minute philosophy episode:

If you want to learn a bit more about the pre-socratic philosophers, maybe you'd be okay with Carl Sagan giving you a short history lesson? I'm sure you wouldn't mind that, right? :)