The Presocratics

2011

Lecture Notes - History of Philosophy - Ancient Greece Hesiod, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Melissus, Democritus, Georgias Note: A revised and expanded version of these notes is available at https://www.academia.edu/42336220/The_Presocratics

American Journal of Philology, 2013

Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, 2009

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

The Classical Review / Volume 64 / Issue 1 / April 2014 , 2014

The Great Russian Encyclopaedia, 2007

A very brief and unorthodox history of Greek philosophy tries to demonstrate how the elimination of some persistent false stereotypes in the historiography of ancient philosophy will result in a different picture and in a different narrative about what happened in Archaic and Classical periods in Greek thought. The stereotypes that we eliminate in this sketch are the following: 1) The pseudo-historical and misleading concept of ‘Presocratics’. 2) Plato-centrism: the enormous exaggeration of the originality of Plato's basic doctrines and the denial of their archaic Pythagorean and Eleatic roots of Platonism. 3) Pseudo-historical evolutionism: focusing on (often imaginary) historical change and ‘development’ and neglect for persistent paradigms and stable forms of ancient thought; neglect for typological considerations which are based on conceptual schemes, and not on words. 4) Underestimation of the Scientific revolution in 6th century Miletus and the wrong denial by Popper and his followers of its empirical non-speculative method (inferential proofs from available evidence tekmeria, tekmairesthai). 5) Pseudo-historical denial (starting with Burnet 1892) of the existence of metaphysical idealism in Preplatonic Greek philosophy which is incomparably more archaic than the revolutionary new Milesian naturalism. Contrary to the deceptive evolutionist story of ‘discovery’ of the first principles in Aristotle’s Alpha book of Metaphysics, the Milesians should not be presented as primitive thinkers who ‘who have not yet’ discovered the moving cause (i.e. god distinct from matter), they rather should be presented as more advanced thinkers who ‘have already dismissed’ the moving cause together with archaic creationism and replaced the anthropomorphic gods of mythopoetic cosmogonies with a revolutionary concept of self-evolving ‘nature’ (physis) unknown before them. Greek philosophy and science had two ‘beginnings’ in the 6 century B.C. initiated by two intellectual giants: Anaximander in the East (the father of naturalistic monism), and Pythagoras in the West, the father of speculative idealist metaphysics. For the next 1000 years or so the two mainstream traditions of Greek thought were engaged in incessant ‘gigantomachia over being’ described in Plato’s Sophist. In the second half of the 5th century the naturalistic Ionian and the mentalist Italian traditions were joined by the new Attic dialectical tradition, that served both camps (Socrates versus Sophists).

Ancient Philosophy, 2020