 Did Alcmaeon present a cosmogony or cosmology in terms of the interaction of pairs of opposites? Such a cosmology could be seen as yet another connection to earlier speculation in Ionia, since Anaximander’s cosmos is based on the “justice” established between conflicting opposites (DK12B1). Heraclitus is also a possible influence on Alcmaeon, since he seems to envisage an endless process of opposites turning into one another such as is proposed for Alcmaeon (Mansfeld 2014a, 91–2). Aristotle provides the primary evidence for such a cosmology in Alcmaeon (Metaph. 986a22 ff. = A3), but he compares Alcmaeon not to the Ionians but to a group of Pythagoreans who proposed a table of ten pairs of opposites. Alcmaeon agrees with these Pythagoreans in regarding the opposites as principles of things. Aristotle complains, however, that Alcmaeon did not arrive at a definite set of opposites but spoke haphazardly of white, black, sweet, bitter, good, bad, large, and small, and only threw in vague comments about the remaining opposites. It may well be that Alcmaeon’s primary discussion of opposites was in relation to his account of the human body (DK, B4; see the discussion of his medical theories above). Aristotle’s language supports this suggestion to some extent, when he summarizes Alcmaeon’s view as that “the majority of human things (tôn anthrôpinôn) are in pairs” (Metaph. 986a31). Isocrates (DK, A3) says that Alcmaeon, in contrast to Empedocles, who postulated four elements, said that there were only two, and, according to a heterodox view, Alcmaeon posited fire and earth as basic elements (Lebedev 1993). Most scholars follow Aristotle, however, in supposing that Alcmaeon thought that the human body and perhaps the cosmos is constituted from the balance of an indefinite number of opposites. Some have seen Alcmaeon’s unwillingness to adopt a fixed set of opposites as a virtue and a further sign of his empiricism, which is willing to accept that the world is less tidy than theoretical constructs, such as the Pythagorean table of opposites, would suggest (Guthrie 1962, 346).