The Presocratic Philosophers

Kirk, Raven and Schofield's The Presocratic Philosophers, published by Cambridge University Press in its second edition in 1983, is the standard scholarly edition with commentary of the Presocratic philosophical fragments, including the chapter establishing Empedocles' doctrine of the four roots, fire, air, water and earth. Its strength is that it remains the standard English reference edition for Presocratic philosophy, assigned across classics and philosophy programs for decades. Its limit is that it presents the fragments through the editors' own interpretive commentary, and specific points of that interpretation remain debated among specialists, so a claim resting on a contested reading should be checked against the wider secondary literature as well.