Great post, glad to see the Empedocles here, my favorite presocratic and so underread now. I'm on a mission to clear up a common misinterpretation of Empedocles, if I might: Empedocles take on Love and Strife is counterintuitive, and is meant as a kind of Heraclitean word game or puzzle. The force of Love brings together unlike kinds, and Strife brings together like kinds. The starting point has all the elements, ordered by justice (dike) and necessity (ananke) into their celestial hierarchy from heaviest to lightest: earth, water, air, fire. Love is the attraction between unlike kinds that leads to new and novel forms, up to and including life. Strife undoes this work and orders like to like, returning to an inert stillness of the first cosmological order. This makes of Empedocles a pretty radical pluralist, squarely against any Parmenidean One or underlying-unity-resolution type of thinking that is all pervasive. Empedocles is also at the heart of Darwin's theory of evolution, as E also posited the evolution of many "worlds" before getting to any recognizable life form. Darwin is basically a modernization and scientification of Empedocles. Cheers!