ABSTRACT
Distinctive approaches to the study of nature were formulated in the Greek world during the period from about 600 to 400 b.c., a period often labeled pre-Socratic, or Presocratic. This later Greek cosmology with specific, detailed questions and a large observational component was a far cry from the global questions of the Presocratics concerning how things began and of what they were made, questions and postulates which were largely untestable and unverifiable. It is probably through Xenophanes; influence that Empedocles can be placed in the Miletian tradition of philosophy that taught that principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things. The emphasis on the matter of the universe is, perhaps, reminiscent of the Milesian cosmological tradition tracing from Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.
