On Early Greek Philosophy - Glenn W. Most & James Redfield

Join us in celebrating the new 9-volume Loeb edition on Early Greek Philosophy with editor Glenn Most. He will be joined in conversation by James Redfield. Stay tuned for other ce-Loeb-rations at the Co-op this January!

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested, not required)

About the books: 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.

About the editor: 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.

About the interlocutor: James M. Redfield has written Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy, and articles on Homer, Herodotus, Plato, and Greek society. His teaching is focused on Greek language, literature, and social history as they can be understood in the light of theory drawn from modern linguistics and anthropology.