Early Greek Philosophy: A Selected Bibliography

The fragments and testimonia of the early Greek philosophers (often labeled the Presocratics) have always been not only a fundamental source for understanding archaic Greek culture and ancient philosophy but also a perennially fresh resource that has stimulated Western thought until the present day. This new systematic conception and presentation of the evidence differs in three ways from Hermann Diels’s groundbreaking work, as well as from later editions: it renders explicit the material’s thematic organization; it includes a selection from such related bodies of evidence as archaic poetry, classical drama, and the Hippocratic corpus; and it presents an overview of the reception of these thinkers until the end of antiquity.

Volume I contains introductory and reference materials essential for using all other parts of the edition. Volumes II and III include chapters on ancient doxography, background, and the Ionians from Pherecydes to Heraclitus. Volumes IV and V present western Greek thinkers from the Pythagoreans to Hippo. Volumes VI and VII comprise later philosophical systems and their aftermath in the fifth and early fourth centuries. Volumes VIII and IX present fifth-century reflections on language, rhetoric, ethics, and politics (the so-called sophists and Socrates) and conclude with an appendix on philosophy and philosophers in Greek drama. Editors André Laks and Glenn Most will discuss Early Greek Philosophy, 1/26/18 6pm at the Co-op. RSVP & details here.

The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis -- How do we get from the polis to the police? Or from Odysseus’s sirens to an ambulance’s? The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.

Arranged alphabetically from Academy to Zoology, the essays—designed and written to serve scholars, students, and the general reader alike—show how the Classical tradition has shaped human endeavors from art to government, mathematics to medicine, drama to urban planning, legal theory to popular culture.

At once authoritative and accessible, learned and entertaining, comprehensive and surprising, and accompanied by an extensive selection of illustrations, this guide illuminates the vitality of the Classical tradition that still surrounds us today.

The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance, by André Laks, Translated by Glenn W. Most -- When we talk about Presocratic philosophy, we are speaking about the origins of Greek philosophy and Western rationality itself. But what exactly does it mean to talk about “Presocratic philosophy” in the first place? How did early Greek thinkers come to be considered collectively as Presocratic philosophers? In this brief book, André Laks provides a history of the influential idea of Presocratic philosophy, tracing its historical and philosophical significance and consequences, from its ancient antecedents to its full crystallization in the modern period and its continuing effects today.

Laks examines ancient Greek and Roman views about the birth of philosophy before turning to the eighteenth-century emergence of the term “Presocratics” and the debates about it that spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He analyzes the intellectual circumstances that led to the idea of Presocratic philosophy—and what was and is at stake in the construction of the notion. The book closes by comparing two models of the history of philosophy—the phenomenological, represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the rationalist, represented by Ernst Cassirer—and their implications for Presocratic philosophy, as well as other categories of philosophical history. Other figures discussed include Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, and J.-P. Vernant. Challenging standard histories of Presocratic philosophy, the book calls for a reconsideration of the conventional story of early Greek philosophy and Western rationality.

About the editors:

André Laks is Professor Emeritus of Ancient Philosophy at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City.

Glenn W. Most is Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He studied Classics and Comparative Literature in Europe and the United States, and has taught at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, and Heidelberg. He has published books on Classics, on the history and methodology of Classical studies, on comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of religion, on literary theory and on the history of art, and has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also on modern philosophy and literature. He was the editor in charge of ancient Greek literature for Der Neue Pauly and directed and co-edited a three-volume selection of the works of Arnaldo Momigliano in German and a new revised edition of the leading American translation of all the surviving Greek tragedies. He is on the editorial board of a number of scholarly journals in Classical studies, philosophy, and other fields. He has recently published a new Loeb edition of the Presocratics and another French edition of the same authors (both together with André Laks), and a co-edited volume on philological methods in a variety of canonical written traditions (together with Anthony Grafton). He is currently working on various projects involving both ancient Greek philology and the comparison of philological practices in different periods and cultures.