The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece

Author: Sassi Maria;Asuni Michele  

Publisher: Princeton University Press‎

Publication year: 2018

E-ISBN: 9781400889761

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780691180502

Subject: B502 Ancient Philosophy

Keyword: 古代哲学,哲学、宗教

Language: ENG

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Description

A celebrated study of the origins of ancient Greek philosophy, now in English for the first time

How can we talk about the beginnings of philosophy today? How can we avoid the conventional opposition of mythology and the dawn of reason and instead explore the multiple styles of thought that emerged between them? In this acclaimed book, available in English for the first time, Maria Michela Sassi reconstructs the intellectual world of the early Greek "Presocratics" to provide a richer understanding of the roots of what used to be called "the Greek miracle."

The beginnings of the long process leading to philosophy were characterized by intellectual diversity and geographic polycentrism. In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, between the Asian shores of Ionia and the Greek city-states of southern Italy, thinkers started to reflect on the cosmic order, elaborate doctrines on the soul, write in solemn Homeric meter, or, later, abandon poetry for an assertive prose. And yet the Presocratics whether the Milesian natural thinkers, the rhapsode Xenophanes, the mathematician and "shaman" Pythagoras, the naturalist and seer Empedocles, the oracular Heraclitus, or the inspired Parmenides all shared an approach to critical thinking that, by questioning traditional viewpoints, revolutionized knowledge.

A unique study that explores the full range of early Greek thinkers in the context of their worlds, the book also features a new introduction to the English editi

Chapter

Back to Aristotle

Knowledge Has Many Faces

Chapter 2 Philosophy in the Cosmogonies

Hesiod: Cosmic Masses and Divine Personas

Anaximander in a World “without Gods”

The Invention of the Cosmos

The Horizon of the Theogonies

Pherecydes’s “Mixed Theology”

A Cosmogony in the Temple of Thetis?

A New, Self-Conscious Knowledge

Chapter 3 Writing Experiments

A “Hot” Society

Egotisms

The Power of Writing

Anaximander: The Treatise and the Map

Xenophanes, Satirist and Polemicist

The Obscure Heraclitus

Chapter 4 Adventures of the Soul

The Soul, the Cosmos, and an Orange

From Breath to the Self

Restless Souls

Empedocles and His Daimon

To Each His Own (Compound)

Chapter 5 Voices of Authority

The Odd Couple

Farewell to the Muse

Power Games

The Truth Revealed in Song

Between Muses and Other Gods

The Specialization of Reason

Bibliography

Index

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