@article{THESIS,
      recid = {3045},
      author = {Wash, Leon Avery},
      title = {Fruit of the Mind:  Metaphor and the Concept of Nature in  Pindar and Empedocles},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {339},
      abstract = {This dissertation is about the early history of the  concept of nature (φύσις or φυή/φυά) in Greek poetry and  philosophy, and the significance of certain metaphors for  that history, especially ones relating to plants (φυτά).  The derivation of φύσις and φυή/φυά from the verb  φύω/φύομαι (“grow,” but also “come to be”), which is  likewise the source of φυτόν (“plant”), continues to  nourish arguments about the historical role of the vegetal  paradigm in the development of the Greek concept of nature.  The recent and widespread renewal of interest in nature and  vegetation, in early Greek literature and innumerable other  contexts, warrants a fresh assessment of the evidence, both  with regard to the precise concepts of nature operating in  the different corpora, and with regard to the precise  significance of the vegetal metaphors. This dissertation  focuses on two corpora, belonging to the fifth-century  poets Pindar and Empedocles. In an era of conceptual  revolutions and intense renewal and experimentation with  metaphors in poetry and other discourse, both of these  poets became famous for their metaphors as well as for  their concepts of nature (for which Pindar uses both φύσις  and φυά, Empedocles only φύσις). Novel analyses of their  conceptualization of nature in Chapters 1 and 3 are paired  with assessments in Chapters 2 and 4 of the significance of  their plant metaphors, such as Pindar’s “fruit of the mind”  and Empedocles’ elemental “roots.” Although it is commonly  asserted that their vegetal imagery implies a concept of a  universal Nature, it has been shown that their (and their  contemporaries’) concepts of φύσις and φυά were limited to  concrete individuals or groups; moreover, this dissertation  argues, against the scholarly consensus, that both authors  consistently use φύσις (and Pindar also φυά) to designate  the “nature” or hypostatized collection of innate  characteristics of an individual or group. One of the  general tasks therefore of this dissertation is to show how  vegetal metaphors bear on the explicit conceptualization of  φύσις or φυά while also showing how certain metaphors  prefigure the concept’s later history. Drawing on work in  historical poetics, historical semantics, the history of  concepts, and the history and theory of metaphors, this  dissertation examines how the emerging concept of nature  entered into original and powerful relationships with  vegetal metaphors in the poetry of Pindar and Empedocles.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3045},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3045},
}