Not Seeing Eye-to-Eye: Making Sense of Aristotle’s Rapid-Fire: Rejoinder to Empedocles’s and Plato’s Views on Light

In his De sensu, Aristotle offers what appears to be an uncharitable rapid-fire critique of Empedocles’s and Plato’s theories of light. This swift assessment ranges over the nature of light with respect to fire, its status to exist in and exit from the eyes, and its likelihood (i.e., chance) to interact and coalesce with the original light of the external world. Upon close inspection and amplification, this analysis reveals that Aristotle has available to him three over-lapping arguments that can further elucidate the plausibility of these curbed criticisms.