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Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary
Since its publication in 1994, Richard McKirahan's Philosophy Before Socrates has become the standard sourcebook in Presocratic philosophy. It provides a wide survey of Greek science, metaphysics, and moral and political philosophy, from their roots in myth to the philosophers and Sophists of the fifth century. A comprehensive selection of fragments and testimonia, translated by the author, is presented in the context of a thorough and accessible discussion. An introductory chapter deals with the sources of Presocratic and Sophistic texts and the special problems of interpretation they present. In its second edition, this work has been updated and expanded to reflect important new discoveries and the most recent scholarship. Changes and additions have been made throughout, the most significant of which are found in the chapters on the Pythagoreans, Parmenides, Zeno, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles, and the new chapter on Philolaus. The translations of some passages have been revised, as have some interpretations and discussions. A new Appendix provides translations of three Hippocratic writings and the Derveni papyrus.
436 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 23, 2020
Since I'm no expert, I'll just quickly compare this to The Presocratic Philosophers, which I read parallel to McKirahan, and which was apparently only recently superseded by the latter as the standard sourcebook for the Presocratics, though KRS continues to enjoy a canonical status in the literature.
What McKirahan has on KRS
- It's more up to date (2011 vs 1983); this was particularly obvious regarding Empedocles
- Generally, where interpretations differed, I found McKirahan's preferable (though again, I am no expert)
- The book continues into the Sophists and the nomos/phusis debate
- Extended translations of Hippocratic texts and fragments from the Derveni papyrus
What KRS has on McKirahan:
- The original Greek, which is occasionally useful even if that amounts to identifying particular words here and there, as it did for me
- Fuller discussion of the history of interpretations, the derivation of interpretations from the sources, and the reliability of the sources
- A long introductory chapter on pre-philosophical cosmogonies and cosmologies
What McKirahan has on KRS
- It's more up to date (2011 vs 1983); this was particularly obvious regarding Empedocles
- Generally, where interpretations differed, I found McKirahan's preferable (though again, I am no expert)
- The book continues into the Sophists and the nomos/phusis debate
- Extended translations of Hippocratic texts and fragments from the Derveni papyrus
What KRS has on McKirahan:
- The original Greek, which is occasionally useful even if that amounts to identifying particular words here and there, as it did for me
- Fuller discussion of the history of interpretations, the derivation of interpretations from the sources, and the reliability of the sources
- A long introductory chapter on pre-philosophical cosmogonies and cosmologies
February 21, 2026
My biggest takeaway from this book was the differences between the Eleatic and Milesian schools. It never dawned on me how different these two were and how their intersection and synthesis seems to be responsible for much of the Platonic mode of thought. I wouldn't say McKirahan agrees with the following interpretation and as always any neat explanation which is easy to understand will always be ruined by historians specializing in ruining everyone else's fun.
To me it seems there are two distinct ways of understanding the world which derive from the Greeks and are concentrated in specific locations. The background to this is a Greek society which is becoming increasingly Democratic. Democracy means the power of the individual has been elevated and as such the importance of rhetoric and the denigration of tradition. In this milieu, challenging the historically authoritative ways of understanding the universe has become at least acceptable enough that people can have arguments regarding it which do not always include the power of the gods in the typical ways. From here we get the typical Milesian school following Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Their contributions all appear to be an atheistic explanation of the mechanisms at play in both the cosmology and cosmogony of the universe. They do not rely on the gods but instead are trying to hunt down the material cause of the universe, its underlying building blocks and how they interact over time. The Milesian discussions are very notable because they mark conceptual advances we can readily identify as leading to science while also lagging behind in some ideas which will be necessary for its eventual domination. The Milesians certainly are attempting to explain our observations of the universe although in a way that is similar to their previous theistic theories. What I mean by this is that the Greeks may have explained lightning with recourse to Zeus and his temper, this is an explanation of one sort in that it explains distantly how lightning comes about and can be a reasonable and accepted response to the question "why is there lightning"? But in another sense of course it is not a useful explanation, it allows us no control over the levers of mechanism in the way we would typically expect from science. In some sense the explanation is too close to the source of the cause and not close enough to the effect of the cause. What I mean by this is that in a typical explanation we would not say "oh there is lightning because of The Big Bang or because of The Laws of Physics" even if these are true, we would expect an explanation which relates the effect (lightning) to its most proximal causes (friction in the clouds or some shit like that, look I'm not a scientist) which are then verifiable through testing since the conceptual distance between the effect and cause is very small and we would not expect much to get in the way. The Milesians are still stuck on the old form of explanation and are giving answers to questions which are more or less like "The Big Bang", they explain in terms of a cosmogony which really can't be tested because it is so distant. However, trying to explain the material world in terms of material is the first step towards a recognizable explanation of empirical phenomena, they are moving closer, in other words. In this context it is actually quite amazing Anaximander made the leap of teasing out a consequence of Thales monism and showing it couldn't quite be correct. He was stuck using long term dynamics since the explanation is placed so distantly from the effect but he argued persuasively that monism would be strange if correct since we know of things which have the exact opposite properties of any other thing, so how can one thing combine in such a way that its emergent properties are the opposite of its underlying properties? This argument is brilliant and original and ends up being correct, the building blocks of the universe do not have properties in-and-of-themselves, instead they combine in various ways and properties emerge from those different combinations.
Anyway, enough on the Milesians. The Eleatic school I consider Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. Something I have let off mentioning until now but I think is very important for the dividing of these two schools is their geographic placement. The Eleatics are mostly centered in the Greek colonies of Southern Italy while the Milesians are in Asia Minor on the coast facing Greece in modern day Turkey. I think this is important because Pythagoras, with his mystical cult and its disciples was located in Southern Italy. When you compare the Eleatics to the Milesians it is difficult not to see the influence of the cult of Pythagoras who claimed things were very different than they appear and that the unseen world of mathematics controlled the inferior world of perception. I think this sort of superiority of the interior or at least of the numerical world had a huge influence on Parmenides. Parmenides and his followers are in some sense much more interesting than the Milesians both because they are harder to understand and thus more difficult to refute but also because in trying to understand them it is difficult to not come to the conclusion they were at least touching on something profound. It is difficult to read Parmenides and not spend months after considering what he really meant. Is it interesting? Or is it psuedo-profound nonsense? Is it a complicated truth he couldn't quite find the words for? Or is it a perfect explication of something we can't understand? Hard to say. The primary difference, as I see it, between the Milesians and Eleatics was that while the Milesians sought to expand and evolve the typical "explanation" framework (i.e., why do we perceive the things we do? Can we explain this in material terms?) the Eleatics had no interest in "explaining" our perceptions at all. They had seen the power of the mind in mathematics and suspected this world of solid truths and apodictic knowledge was much superior to the one of passing, dizzying colors and sounds. Instead of explaining the features of the world with recourse to other more basic features, they sought to uncover truths about the "world" through thought and reasoning which, due to its superiority, must be true of the phenomenal world as well. The rationalist/empiricist debate might be hard-wired into me and this point making it difficult not to understand this as the beginning of it, but I think if there were an extant discourse on the difference in methods during this period of Greek philosophy it would read very similarly to the Modern rationalist/empiricist debate. Zeno, as always, barely deserves mention for his terrible arguments, but it does clear things up a great deal to view him not as explaining something but as showing that the superior world of the mind shows what we see cannot be true.
After the two groups are exposed to each others' works a synthesis begins and an ongoing dialogue with fixed questions to answer and objections to overcome begins to emerge. My favorite of this bunch was definitely Anaxagoras, I think his philosophy is at once fascinating, plausible, and alien to our modern metaphysics. My least favorite has always been Empedocles, maybe he is just too influential and has become present in what we consume, but I have always found him boring and the strife/love mechanism not even worth discussing. Maybe you can argue attraction and repulsion are the ultimate forces of the universe and so he had some precursory thoughts to this, but that's not how I read him. The Atomists have always been fascinating for me not only because they ended up being correct but because they appear to be the first non-religious "worldview". They are coherent combination of separate ideas which all hinge upon each other and form a method through which one can view and live their life. They combine a metaphysical view of random atomic movement with determinism and this yields a moral attitude of stoicism.
To me it seems there are two distinct ways of understanding the world which derive from the Greeks and are concentrated in specific locations. The background to this is a Greek society which is becoming increasingly Democratic. Democracy means the power of the individual has been elevated and as such the importance of rhetoric and the denigration of tradition. In this milieu, challenging the historically authoritative ways of understanding the universe has become at least acceptable enough that people can have arguments regarding it which do not always include the power of the gods in the typical ways. From here we get the typical Milesian school following Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Their contributions all appear to be an atheistic explanation of the mechanisms at play in both the cosmology and cosmogony of the universe. They do not rely on the gods but instead are trying to hunt down the material cause of the universe, its underlying building blocks and how they interact over time. The Milesian discussions are very notable because they mark conceptual advances we can readily identify as leading to science while also lagging behind in some ideas which will be necessary for its eventual domination. The Milesians certainly are attempting to explain our observations of the universe although in a way that is similar to their previous theistic theories. What I mean by this is that the Greeks may have explained lightning with recourse to Zeus and his temper, this is an explanation of one sort in that it explains distantly how lightning comes about and can be a reasonable and accepted response to the question "why is there lightning"? But in another sense of course it is not a useful explanation, it allows us no control over the levers of mechanism in the way we would typically expect from science. In some sense the explanation is too close to the source of the cause and not close enough to the effect of the cause. What I mean by this is that in a typical explanation we would not say "oh there is lightning because of The Big Bang or because of The Laws of Physics" even if these are true, we would expect an explanation which relates the effect (lightning) to its most proximal causes (friction in the clouds or some shit like that, look I'm not a scientist) which are then verifiable through testing since the conceptual distance between the effect and cause is very small and we would not expect much to get in the way. The Milesians are still stuck on the old form of explanation and are giving answers to questions which are more or less like "The Big Bang", they explain in terms of a cosmogony which really can't be tested because it is so distant. However, trying to explain the material world in terms of material is the first step towards a recognizable explanation of empirical phenomena, they are moving closer, in other words. In this context it is actually quite amazing Anaximander made the leap of teasing out a consequence of Thales monism and showing it couldn't quite be correct. He was stuck using long term dynamics since the explanation is placed so distantly from the effect but he argued persuasively that monism would be strange if correct since we know of things which have the exact opposite properties of any other thing, so how can one thing combine in such a way that its emergent properties are the opposite of its underlying properties? This argument is brilliant and original and ends up being correct, the building blocks of the universe do not have properties in-and-of-themselves, instead they combine in various ways and properties emerge from those different combinations.
Anyway, enough on the Milesians. The Eleatic school I consider Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. Something I have let off mentioning until now but I think is very important for the dividing of these two schools is their geographic placement. The Eleatics are mostly centered in the Greek colonies of Southern Italy while the Milesians are in Asia Minor on the coast facing Greece in modern day Turkey. I think this is important because Pythagoras, with his mystical cult and its disciples was located in Southern Italy. When you compare the Eleatics to the Milesians it is difficult not to see the influence of the cult of Pythagoras who claimed things were very different than they appear and that the unseen world of mathematics controlled the inferior world of perception. I think this sort of superiority of the interior or at least of the numerical world had a huge influence on Parmenides. Parmenides and his followers are in some sense much more interesting than the Milesians both because they are harder to understand and thus more difficult to refute but also because in trying to understand them it is difficult to not come to the conclusion they were at least touching on something profound. It is difficult to read Parmenides and not spend months after considering what he really meant. Is it interesting? Or is it psuedo-profound nonsense? Is it a complicated truth he couldn't quite find the words for? Or is it a perfect explication of something we can't understand? Hard to say. The primary difference, as I see it, between the Milesians and Eleatics was that while the Milesians sought to expand and evolve the typical "explanation" framework (i.e., why do we perceive the things we do? Can we explain this in material terms?) the Eleatics had no interest in "explaining" our perceptions at all. They had seen the power of the mind in mathematics and suspected this world of solid truths and apodictic knowledge was much superior to the one of passing, dizzying colors and sounds. Instead of explaining the features of the world with recourse to other more basic features, they sought to uncover truths about the "world" through thought and reasoning which, due to its superiority, must be true of the phenomenal world as well. The rationalist/empiricist debate might be hard-wired into me and this point making it difficult not to understand this as the beginning of it, but I think if there were an extant discourse on the difference in methods during this period of Greek philosophy it would read very similarly to the Modern rationalist/empiricist debate. Zeno, as always, barely deserves mention for his terrible arguments, but it does clear things up a great deal to view him not as explaining something but as showing that the superior world of the mind shows what we see cannot be true.
After the two groups are exposed to each others' works a synthesis begins and an ongoing dialogue with fixed questions to answer and objections to overcome begins to emerge. My favorite of this bunch was definitely Anaxagoras, I think his philosophy is at once fascinating, plausible, and alien to our modern metaphysics. My least favorite has always been Empedocles, maybe he is just too influential and has become present in what we consume, but I have always found him boring and the strife/love mechanism not even worth discussing. Maybe you can argue attraction and repulsion are the ultimate forces of the universe and so he had some precursory thoughts to this, but that's not how I read him. The Atomists have always been fascinating for me not only because they ended up being correct but because they appear to be the first non-religious "worldview". They are coherent combination of separate ideas which all hinge upon each other and form a method through which one can view and live their life. They combine a metaphysical view of random atomic movement with determinism and this yields a moral attitude of stoicism.
February 4, 2019
A very informative review of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. There’s no point in rating the book according to what one thinks about the philosophers themselves so I’ll refrain to gauging form rather than matter.
The book is expectedly organised so that each chapter tells the story of one of the exponents, nonetheless retaining a coherent narrative. The author doesn’t assume any prior understanding of the subject and the language is very accessible without being at all trivial or simplistic.
McKirahan clearly informs us that his goal is to acquaint the reader with the latest and prevailing interpretations of the recounted philosophers so you shouldn’t expect any heated scholarly debate nor fringe theories. I also liked the balance between the quotation and descriptive parts. You can easily grasp the gist of various ideas only turning to primary sources later on.
To sum up, a very comprehensive and approachable read, ideal first book on the matter.
Those interested in the subject should also consider “Early Greek Philosophy” by Penguin, still in my Want to Read list.
I also recommend the Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast, a yet another accessible and modern approach to the subject.
The book is expectedly organised so that each chapter tells the story of one of the exponents, nonetheless retaining a coherent narrative. The author doesn’t assume any prior understanding of the subject and the language is very accessible without being at all trivial or simplistic.
McKirahan clearly informs us that his goal is to acquaint the reader with the latest and prevailing interpretations of the recounted philosophers so you shouldn’t expect any heated scholarly debate nor fringe theories. I also liked the balance between the quotation and descriptive parts. You can easily grasp the gist of various ideas only turning to primary sources later on.
To sum up, a very comprehensive and approachable read, ideal first book on the matter.
Those interested in the subject should also consider “Early Greek Philosophy” by Penguin, still in my Want to Read list.
I also recommend the Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast, a yet another accessible and modern approach to the subject.
May 14, 2018
Thorough and thoughtful
A well put together treaties on the PreSocratic Greek philosophers. Now that I have read this, I can go on reading Plato with a lot more understanding and insight.
A well put together treaties on the PreSocratic Greek philosophers. Now that I have read this, I can go on reading Plato with a lot more understanding and insight.
August 28, 2025
Certainement le meilleur livre d'introduction sur les philosophes archaïques (du nom de leur période qui précède celle de Socrate). Présentant souvent le "tournant de Socrate" sur les questions éthiques, on voit que cette réputation est surfaite. Les philosophes archaïques se posaient déjà bon nombre de questions. Dès le début, l'auteur cite déjà les sources, fiables ou non, de l'Antiquité. Également, il donne son avis sur certaines légendes entourant ces philosophes et également leur formation. De plus, il partage son opinion, qui est sujette à débat bien évidemment, sur l'interprétation des fragments que l'on a des auteurs.
Bref, un superbe ouvrage qui nous permet de se situer et de voir la pertinence de l'émergence de la philosophie dans la Grèce antique. Il ne manque pas de situer les causes et aussi l'impact de certains poètes, notamment Hésiode et sa théogonie (naissance des dieux).
Bref, un superbe ouvrage qui nous permet de se situer et de voir la pertinence de l'émergence de la philosophie dans la Grèce antique. Il ne manque pas de situer les causes et aussi l'impact de certains poètes, notamment Hésiode et sa théogonie (naissance des dieux).
April 30, 2025
This was an excellent introduction to the thought of various presocratic philosophers. Having no knowledge going in I wasn’t aware of how focused the book would be on disentangling the various (though often limited) sources to achieve a coherent interpretation of the philosophies of these thinkers. I found this exploration into the level of reliability of sources very interesting though sometimes frustrating from the perspective of just wanting to know what Zeno was talking about. Still it was an excellent book.
October 2, 2023
Excellent resource, and one that can be revisited and used as a reference book. His treatment of each fragment is even handed and introduces the central discourse of each philosopher. And he's an excellent footnoter; as a student, I say blessings on his head for this. Sources for days.
He puts most of the fragments at the beginning, but not all of them, and I do wish he had them all in one spot rather than scattered through his chapters.
He puts most of the fragments at the beginning, but not all of them, and I do wish he had them all in one spot rather than scattered through his chapters.
January 5, 2026
Fine commentary, but I'm becoming "that guy": no point in reading them in translation. No point in reading the Taco Bell menu in anything but the original Greek. Translate my Goodreads posts into Attic Greek... &c
May 24, 2020
Great review of the Pre-Socratic philosophers that provides enough depth to really understand the material.
February 4, 2023
Excellent commentary and presentation of the major Presocratic philosophers with their key extant fragments.
April 8, 2023
McKirahan’s Philosophy before Socrates is the best book for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the presocratics, and is much more up-to-date when compared to Kirk and Raven’s book
February 12, 2026
Some of these philosophers should’ve been silent. Don’t share your ideas
August 1, 2008
While I loved reading this book, it did raise one major question for me: how do we know the philosophers included in this text believed the fragments that have survived? Is it not possible that these snipets were included in a larger text as a foil for the philosophers' true opinion?
October 3, 2008
i tag this book dry in the sense of being seriously academic in tone, but also in the heraclitean sense! (right on heraclitus.) and if you don't know what that means, too bad. i slugged through it, and consequently i get to know some things you don't.
September 19, 2011
Two universities. Two courses on the Presocratics. One I took as a student; one I am marker/grader for. Both courses used this as the principal text.
It's very informative. Begins with Hesiod. Ends with the Sophists. Essential for anybody interested in the history of philosophy.
It's very informative. Begins with Hesiod. Ends with the Sophists. Essential for anybody interested in the history of philosophy.
July 9, 2007
Good overview of ancient Greek philosophy.
September 13, 2008
A thoroughgoing compilation of western the thinkers who shaped our worldview prior to the great one.
November 24, 2009
This was recommended by my husband. It's from an atheistic point of view, but it's still interesting. It's just reminding my that there is nothing new under the sun.
December 29, 2009
Easy to read and understand. Gives you a great overview of the Presocratic's that makes you reflect on where the dawn of scientific thought begins. A good book overall... :)
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November 21, 2009None
April 16, 2014
Presocratics are boring. Do yourself a favor and start with Plato. Use this as a reference for when Plato or Aristotle drops a name.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews