Prologue: Early Greek Thought: Before the Dawn

Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought, 2013

Anthology of ancient Greek authors (in Greek). Athens: Giourdas, 2006

The anthology of ancient Greek texts that you have in your hands is a useful guide for your access to the intellectual works of the Attic period of Greek literature, since it suggests subjects of study, which can be studied as such in depth, but also in parallel with the other thematographies and with the best-known texts of the time and it is possible to serve both informatively and critically. It expands your knowledge of the Attic orators, historians and philosophers of the period, and your familiarity with the Attic dialect of the ancient Greek language, with a range of new words and etymological information. You can use it in your lesson to cultivate students' self-activity, their ability to judge and evaluate educational goods, develop their aesthetic literacy and good supervision of the length, size and weight of their written works of the Attic period, in the genres of rhetoric, philosophy and historiography. The structure of the anthology allows you to make your approach flexible, depending on each text and author. You can, therefore, give small factual introductions, concerning the meaning, the cultural and ideological elements, and the motivations of the persons. Very important is the overview regarding the synchronic connections between the various texts, but also the timeless significance and interpretation of their content. However, each text is a whole of its own meaning and the reception of the ideas and information it offers is possible by focusing on its structure and content. We examine both the elements of form and the individual linguistic elements, in the function that exists between them. Editorial comments reveal the entire structure of the text, focus on its content, and reveal the author's temperament.

Aristeas. Philologia classica et historia antiqua, 2021

This is a full text of the review of M. Sassi's monograph 'The beginnings of philosophy in Greece' (2018), a very brief exposition of which has been published previously in Classical Review. While passing a generally favorable verdict on the value of Sassi''s contribution to the study of this much-debated topic, the author also criticizes somewhat excessive 'pluralism' of 'beginnings' admitted by Sassi, by emphasizing the fundamental and leading role of the two main 'beginnings', represented by the Ionian Peri physeos historia, a detached scientific study of nature (physis), on the one hand, and the Italian (Pythagorean and Eleatic) 'search for wisdom' (philosophy as a way of life), primarily centered on psyche and setting life-building and educational goals. By engaging in a dialogue with Sassi, the author takes opportunity to expose his own views on the origin of Greek philosophy and science that disagree with much of what one can read in modern histories of ancient philosophy about Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoreans, Alcmaeon and other Pre-Platonic thinkers. This disagreement results not so much from the invention of new interpretations, as from the rejection of the 19th - 20th centuries hypercritical approach to the sources of Preplatonic philosophy, as well as from the rejection of the false category of 'Presocrastics' together with the ill-founded doxographical theory of Diels, and a return to the ancient tradition combined with respect to the opinion of the ancient readers of the lost Preplatonic works: the study of 'hermeneutical isoglosses' and reliance on the consensus of independent ancient readers who possessed the complete texts of the lost Pre-Platonic works. Thesaurus Linguae Graecae provides a powerful tool for this research, unknown to previous generations of scholars.

Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, 2007

This essay analyzes the archaic Greek philosophers in their cultural and historical context. What is a "philosopher" in this period? What kinds of "philosophy" did these thinkers practice?

The Cambridge History of Classical Literature

Preface xi Source abbreviations xv Lives and writings of the early Greek philosophers xvii Chronology xxix Map xxxi The scope of early Greek philosophy a. a. long 1 Sources jaap mansfeld 22 The beginnings of cosmology keimpe algra 45 The Pythagorean tradition carl a. huffman 66 Heraclitus edward hussey 88 Parmenides and Melissus david sedley 113 Zeno richard d. mckirahan jr. 134 Empedocles and Anaxagoras: Responses to Parmenides daniel w. graham 159 The atomists c. c. w. taylor 181 v vi contents 10 Rational theology sarah broadie Early interest in knowledge j. h. lesher 12 Soul, sensation, and thought andré laks 13 Culpability, responsibility, cause: Philosophy, historiography, and medicine in the fifth century mario vegetti 14 Rhetoric and relativism: Protagoras and Gorgias paul woodruff 15 Protagoras and Antiphon: Sophistic debates on justice fernanda decleva caizzi 16 The poetics of early Greek philosophy glenn w. most Bibliography Index of passages Index of names and subjects

Philosophy as a discipline has an historical perspective. In the case of the ……………. Greek philosophy the period commences with Thales of the seventh century B.C. and ends with Aristole in the fourth century B.C. This period exhibits certain definite characteristic which were based on the following four presuppositions which were based on the following four presuppositions; namely, a particular attitude towards reality; the cosmos as a totality; the nature of life; and the idea of the constant. These constitute the subject of this article.

This article addresses contemporary efforts to understand how the earliest practitioners of philosophy conceived of the philosophic life. It argues that, for Plato, the concept of bios was a central, animating, and structuring object of philosophic inquiry. Concentration on the imagery Plato employed to draw bios into the purview of philosophic contemplation and choice points to interpretative avenues that further the aim of treating the dialogues as complex, integrated wholes, and offers a new approach to the question of the status of image-making in them. The article concludes with thoughts on how an exploration of bios might extend beyond Plato to Aristotle, via an examination of his treatment of the range of human and animal bioi, suggesting that such an examination clarifies the relationship between his analysis of the polis-dwelling animal and his broader investigation of living beings as such.

Indo-Europen Linguistics and Classical Philology, 2010

Why did western Greek philosophers (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles), unlike their Eastern Ionian colleagues, chose the Homeric hexameter rather than prose to express their thought? It has been thought by some that these philosophical poems represent a continuation or adaptation of the Homeric tradition for didactic purposes. We reject this interpretation because it ignores the fundamental difference between the Ionian and Italian philosophical traditions. The Ionian tradition was scientific in spirit and therefore used Ionian prose. The Italian tradition starting from Pythagoras was a revolt against the Ionian naturalistic monism and an attempt to restore the traditional religious world-view in a new quasi-scientific form. Western Greek philosophy from the start was ethical-religious in its aims, and therefore it chose the most “hieratic” poetic medium of the time, the language of Pythia and Apollo. And in doing so it did not aim so much at the “continuation” of the Homeric tradition as at “replacing” the old bad mythology of the poets with a good new one, just as Plato later tried to replace bad old myths with new philosophical myths of his own. Western Greek philosophical poems, consequently, should be viewed not as a revival of the old epic poetry, but as its radical reform and a peritrope. In Greek dialectics peritrope was a technical term for “turning over” of the opponent’s argument against himself. We use this term in a less technical and a wider sense of a polemical device which aims at “defeating an opponent with his own weapons”. Peritrope is an often neglected polemical device of the Greek culture of the philosophical debate. E.g. the cosmogony of Plato’s “Timaeus” can be interpreted as a creationist peritrope of the Ionian (and atomistic) naturalistic determinist physics. And the Derveni papyrus (i.e. "Horai" of Prodicus of Ceos) presents exactly the reverse case: a polemical naturalistic peritrope of the creationst Orphic (i.e. Pythagorean) theogony.