The article proposes to study the role the doctrine of fundamental material elements of nature, present in the pre-Socratic philosophy, plays in the aesthetics of Gaston Bachelard. At the same time, it seeks to point out how this reference, which in Greek Antiquity expresses a philosophical conception of physis - of the world of sensible reality - could have not been appropriated by the epistemology of Bachelard, influenced and formed by the intellectual revolution wrought in the scientific field between the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
Aesthetics; Bachelard; pre-Socratic