Abstract

The status that Aristotle’s Poetics gives to Empedocles seems double: He is first and foremost physiologon, a natural scientist, but seemingly also a poet. Keeping in mind the Aristotelean distinction between theoretical and practical sciences, where natural science belongs to the former and the study of poetry to the latter, this double status requires explanation – how can the same work be the object of both theoretical and practical science? Commencing from Aristotle’s concept of metaphor, this article proposes three such explanations: One rooted in Aristotle’s thoughts on style, one in epistemology, and one in his writings on language.