Status Updates From Early Greek Philosophy

“It is a remarkable proof of Plato’s historical sense that he should have been able to give an account of the state of scientific opinion at Athens some twenty-five years before his own birth, without, so far as I can see, a single anachronism.”

“As we have seen, there is good reason for believing [the Pythagoreans] only knew three of the regular solids, the cube, the pyramid, and the dodecahedron.”
Somehow this sounds like a major diss - they only knew three shapes.

Empedocles is wash for me. On the one hand, he discovered that air is not nothing, but an actual substance. Great scientific discovery.
On the other hand, he is said to have died by jumping into a volcano to prove he was a god. Big fail. 50/50