The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists - Robin Waterfield (Translator), Anaximander, Anaximenes, Empedocles, Gorgias of Leontini, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Protagoras, Pythagoras, Thales, Thrasymachus, Zeno Audiobook
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Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and the first Western philosophers developed theories of the world which express simultaneously their sense of wonder and their intuition that the world should be comprehensible. But their enterprise was by no means limited to this proto-scientific task. Through, for instance, Heraclitus’ enigmatic sayings, the poetry of Parmenides and Empedocles, and Zeno’s paradoxes, the Western world was introduced to metaphysics, rationalist theology, ethics, and logic, by thinkers who often seem to be mystics or shamans as much as philosophers or scientists in the modern mould. And out of the Sophists’ reflections on human beings and their place in the world arose and interest in language, and in political, moral, and social philosophy.
This volume contains a translation of all the most important fragments of the Presocratics and Sophists, and of the most informative testimonia from ancient sources, supplemented by lucid commentary.
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This post has 14 comments with rating of 5/5
September 30th, 2023
Many thanks!
September 30th, 2023
The #1 problem with the Pre-Socratics is that there is so very little of them left. Then the #2 problem is that the little which survives was preserved largely by later writers who disliked them (the Academy and the Lyceum), or misunderstood them (the Hellenic writers), or hated and misunderstood all learning and all speculation (the entire Dark Ages).
But then again: ‘in the gloom the gold gathers the light against it’; sometimes we just have to make do with what is left.
September 30th, 2023
Great!
September 30th, 2023
Great stuff, hdgdf.
Prydeful: Trying too hard again. False & illogical. Otherwise fine.
September 30th, 2023
Plato took precedent because he was religious, and his pythagorean nonsense folded well into christian thought. Others were omitted because they said things that were useful, and thus blasphemous or uninteresting to monks.
September 30th, 2023
Stoic logic, atomic theory, Zeno’s refutations of continua, and so on, each of these foundational ideas has had to be reinvented because they didn’t fit the platonist-aristotelian-christian paradigm; magical thinking impeded progress for thousands of years.
September 30th, 2023
Too reductive. There are multiple reasons that texts have not survived (copying was difficult, laborious, expensive; with the facilities under regular barbarian attack & despoliation during many periods). Also, many risqué writings were continuously copied, due to the fascination for books & knowledge generally, during the many renaissances & golden ages throughout medieval Europe.
Conversely, some very prominent & well-received writings by Churchmen such as the great Francisco de Vitoria (Spanish philosopher, theologian, & jurist of Renaiss Spain; founder of tradition in philosophy known as the School of Salamanca, noted esp for his concept of just war & international law) - do not survive - & that was the 16th c.
Plato did not take precedence at all (& virtually all thinkers were religious), his writings often being condemned as pagan mysticism.
Church Fathers were often criticised if they tended towards Platonism. The Church’s hostility to Origen’s Platonism led to his condemnation at the Second Council of Constantinople.
St. Augustine also distanced himself from the Platonic analysis.
Another extremely influential early church father, Tertullian, also condemned the Socrates/Jesus parallel at great length.
October 1st, 2023
Being founded on orphism, with it’s dualist immortal souls, salvation, and heaven, christianity shares a direct ancestor with platonism. Aristotle’s theology has been repeatedly referenced by theologians looking for belief-justification, and platonist thought has dominated the western world up until the 20th century, when it finally started to tumble (though there’s still a ways to go yet).
It’s of course true that the devoutly religious like to bicker with and sometimes excommunicate and murder their closest religious fellows. But Plato and Aristotle were not intellectually dominant in their time, and that they became so later was a choice on the part of scribes, who thought them worth preserving and other works not so. See again that quote from Robin Waterfield, classicist and translator who’s dedicated much of his life to Plato and Aristotle, their preservation and dissemination, and so hasn’t got the same bias here as me:
“Most ancient Greek literature has been lost, sometimes by accident, but more often because it was felt to be not worth preserving, in the sense that, in the centuries before the invention of the printing press, no one was asking scribes to make copies. Yet we have the complete set of Plato’s dialogues; not a single word that he published has been lost.”
October 1st, 2023
Again, we ought not be too reductive. There are too many operative historical factors determining survival.
Metempsychosis & existence of pure soul are directly opposed to Christianity. The real ancestor is of course Judaism. This is not to say that the philosophers’ insights were not influential (Athens AND Jerusalem, after all), just that precedence would have been very different. Aristotle’s natural theology was significant as it was grounded on a metaphysical evaluation of the sensible world, & crucial reasoning around causation.
Plato hasn’t dominated the Western world, he has more accurately gone in & out of fashion, in various forms (geddit?), throughout the history of ideas.
And bickering & antagonism is scarcely confined to the metaphysically curious, by any means.
During the Carolingian Renaissance, there was a positive desperation to find books - any books - to copy & preserve. The efforts in many instances were truly heroic, because there were a lot of people (not bibliophiles, by any means) out to destroy these centres of preservation & learning.
As a philosophy enthusiast, and as someone with a keen interest in the history of ideas, there are few thinkers more stimulating to read than Plato. This owes a great deal to the dialogic form.
As to a Platonic system of thought, this can be difficult to pin down. Many characters propose enormously diverse ideas; they are thrown into the discourse, developed, then discarded. There’s the evolution betw the earlier & later dialogues; the relatively approachable & the more abstruse dialogues.
The process is more about questioning than arriving at Kantian/Hegelian conclusions.
October 1st, 2023
Christianity was a syncretic development, with multiple ancestors. The historical Jesus of course lived in a jewish milieu, and early christians raided jewish scripture for justifying prophecy fulfillments and so on. Jesus himself though, in addition to the jewish apocalypse cult stuff that mostly didn’t survive him, was a wandering ascetic in the tradition that had by this time moved west from india where it earlier produced Śākyamuni, and he taught the same self-denial, rejecting money and family attachments and worldly possessions and so on. This bears out in the parallel developments of eastern/western temples/monasteries and their monks. But most importantly for the above point, though the very first christians were jewish, the christians who wrote the christian new testament were educated greeks operating in a surrounding tradition of orphism, and they introduced ideas like mortal body / immortal soul dualism and salvation with eternal life in heaven that were not present in either judaism or jesus’ teachings. Of course the nature of “soul” itself has been a moot point for much of christian history, with assertions about e.g. “we must preserve our mortal bodies so that they can be raised again; no cremation”, but soul-resurrection was at its earliest asserted already by paul.
And though credit is not always given to Plato himself, the platonist worldview—idealism, confusion of symbols for their referents, black-and-white thinking—has been dominant since him. His strain of greek thought, adopted by christians and spread throughout the roman empire, went so unchallenged as to seemingly have no alternative at all. Plato’s characters put on a show of “questioning everything”, but as he reveals the goal is not an “I Know Nothing” endpoint (a common semi-mistranslation; ought to be more like “I Only Know What I Know, And Nothing More”) but rather a fallback on “anamnesis”, i.e. ignoring empiricism and falling back into our own heads (with the only possible assertion from there being “the map is the territory”, mind projection fallacy). Maybe it’s due to having been introduced to his works at such a young age, but beyond just being wrongheaded i’ve always found his style insufferably smug.
October 1st, 2023
It was in metempsychosis & the existence of pure soul that the sharpest divisions were demonstrated between Platonism & Christianity. The Gospel of John bears the greatest influence of Hellenic philosophy & metaphysics (particularly in the Logos).
Aristotle has always been the most significant of the Greeks, in my tradition at any rate, via Thomism. So much so that he could be referred to as “The Philosopher,” without causing any awkward confusion whatsoever.
Well, “I Know Nothing” was always an oxym0r0n.
As to resorting to our own subjective impressions, this would anticipate Kantian epistemology concerning the limits of perception. That the noumenal cannot be truly experienced or known (which was a phenomenal insight).
November 1st, 2023
Caesar never fails to crack me up. Gosh he knows a lot of big words. Ask him to stitch together 1000 years of philosophy and distill it into 2 or 3 paragraphs that explain everything and he’ll do it! He’s just that good. I bet he has like eightyleven PhDs.
October 9th, 2024
@howlafist how does one, presumably not religious have so much confidence in HIS INTERPRETATIONS of completely subjective theories, ideas, and world views? I actually agree with a lot of the things you believe about Western thought and how it has come to be. But I personally always feel a little dirty attempting to argue things like this with any kind of contempt for the opposing beliefs.
January 19th, 2025
Reseed please.
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