What do you think?
Rate this book
The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy
The Western tradition of philosophy began in Greece with a cluster of thinkers often called the Presocratics, whose influence has been incalculable. All these thinkers are discussed in this volume both as individuals and collectively in chapters on rational theology, epistemology, psychology, rhetoric and relativism, justice, and poetics. Assuming no knowledge of Greek or prior knowledge of the subject, this volume provides new readers with the most convenient and accessible guide to early Greek philosophy available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of early Greek thought.
460 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 1995
22 people are currently reading
281 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 19, 2025
Anthony A. Long’s The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy sits at an interesting junction between a handbook, a scholarly intervention, and a pedagogical resource. The Cambridge Companions as a series aim to do something quite delicate: they need to be authoritative enough for researchers to respect, yet accessible enough for advanced undergraduates or non-specialists to actually read. In this volume Long manages that balance with an admirable lightness of touch.
The Presocratics are often seen as a forbidding subject: the fragments are sparse, the language gnomic, the testimonia second-hand and often hostile, and the interpretive traditions contested to the point of trench warfare.
But what this Companion does, chapter by chapter, is to pull away from the reductive label “Pre-Socratic” and to insist that Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, and the rest are philosophers in their own right, grappling with problems whose intensity and originality deserve to be heard without the echo of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thunder drowning them out.
The first set of essays naturally turns to the Milesians: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Here the volume establishes its method. Rather than rehearse the usual “Thales says all is water, Anaximenes says all is air,” the authors stress the context of early cosmology, the attempt to move from mythos to logos, but not in a crude triumphalist story of rationality supplanting superstition. Thales’ claim is less important as a literal doctrine of watery substance than as a methodological gesture: reality can be explained in terms of a single principle, and that principle can be something observable rather than divine caprice.
Anaximander’s apeiron receives particular care: it is neither a fuzzy infinity nor a mystic void, but a conceptual innovation that allows the cosmos to be self-regulating, balancing opposites without needing a divine overseer.
Anaximenes, with his air and rarefaction-condensation scheme, shows the first signs of a physical continuum, a proto-theory of states of matter. The Companion thus foregrounds not the “naïve materialism” often attributed to these figures, but their daring and coherent moves toward systematic accounts of nature.
The transition to Heraclitus and Parmenides is presented as a dramatic confrontation, but the contributors are careful not to caricature them as “flux” versus “being” in a comic-book opposition. Heraclitus’ fragments are read with sensitivity to style: the aphoristic and oracular tone is not accidental, but an integral part of his philosophical method, forcing the reader to engage in a kind of dialectic with the text itself.
The logos, ever present but obscure, is what unites opposites, and the flux is not chaos but ordered transformation. Parmenides, meanwhile, is not treated as a killjoy who declares motion and change impossible, but as a rigorist who pushes the logic of non-contradiction to its utmost.
The Companion’s reading emphasizes that Parmenides inaugurates metaphysics as the inquiry into what can be thought and said without incoherence. His “Way of Truth” is not a metaphysical dogma, but a demonstration of how reason sets boundaries to doxa. The tension between Heraclitus and Parmenides is thereby elevated: not a simple quarrel, but a template for Western philosophy’s dialectic between becoming and being.
From there the focus turns to the Pythagoreans. Here the Companion departs from the older scholarship’s obsession with Pythagoras as a half-mythical sage or cult leader. Instead, the chapter stresses the role of number, ratio, and harmony as metaphysical principles.
The Pythagorean way of embedding mathematics in cosmology is not a primitive version of later science, but a recognition that structure itself has explanatory power. The famous “music of the spheres” is not quaint ornamentation, but a profound attempt to bind together ethics, mathematics, and cosmology under the rubric of order.
The Pythagorean contribution is thus recast as both philosophical and cultural: a model of how philosophy could be lived as a bios, not just written as doctrine.
The pluralists—Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists—are treated as innovators who found ways to escape the Parmenidean prohibition without lapsing into incoherence. Empedocles’ four roots and the twin forces of Love and Strife are presented not as fanciful myth-making but as an ingenious dual explanatory system, allowing both mixture and separation.
The Companion’s treatment is especially strong in drawing out Empedocles’ proto-evolutionary accounts of living beings, his medical theories, and his self-stylization as both seer and scientist. Anaxagoras, by introducing nous as the ordering principle, is shown to reinsert intelligence into cosmology, but not in a crude theistic sense: nous is impersonal, infinite, and the very condition of order.
The Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, are of course given pride of place as precursors to materialism. But rather than casting them as modern mechanists avant la lettre, the essays stress their conceptual daring: the void as real, atoms as infinite and indivisible, phenomena as explicable by configurations. The ethical dimension of Democritus, his reflections on cheerfulness and moderation, receive due emphasis, preventing him from being flattened into a mere proto-physicist.
The volume does not stop at doctrines. A cluster of essays examines the sophists and the intellectual environment in which Socrates emerged. Relativism, rhetoric, the problem of physis versus nomos—these are presented not as sophistries in the pejorative sense, but as serious philosophical challenges.
Protagoras’ man-measure doctrine, Gorgias’ radical skepticism, and the sophistic emphasis on persuasion are treated as provocations that demanded Plato’s and Aristotle’s responses. The Companion resists the Platonic caricature of the sophists as intellectual charlatans, instead showing how they represent philosophy’s engagement with politics, language, and culture.
One of the book’s most valuable sections is its methodological essays. The problem of fragments and doxography is addressed with sober clarity. Since virtually none of the Presocratics’ works survive complete, what we have are quotations, paraphrases, and hostile reports.
The Companion makes explicit how precarious the reconstruction is, how much depends on Aristotle’s categorizations or Simplicius’ commentaries, and how easily modern scholars can be misled by taking these second-hand accounts as transparent. This awareness is not meant to paralyze interpretation, but to instill a critical humility: to read the Presocratics is always to engage with a palimpsest.
The reception chapters extend the story. Plato’s dialogues are shown to be saturated with Presocratic echoes—Parmenides and Heraclitus haunting his metaphysics, the Atomists providing a foil for his Timaeus, the sophists serving as sparring partners.
Aristotle, with his systematic classifications, is presented as both the great preserver and the great distorter: we know the Presocratics largely through his lens, but his scheme of causes and principles also reshapes them to fit his own agenda. Later receptions, from the Hellenistic schools to Renaissance humanists, are traced to show how the Presocratics never ceased to be fertile ground for reimagining philosophy’s origins.
What makes this Companion distinctive, when set against classic introductions like Kirk and Raven’s The Presocratic Philosophers or Jonathan Barnes’
The Presocratic Philosophers, is precisely this pluralism of approach. Kirk and Raven offered a monumental, text-heavy compendium, with Greek and translation side by side, and running commentary that treated the Presocratics as precursors whose main interest was to lay foundations for Plato and Aristotle.
Their work remains indispensable as a sourcebook, but it is more a quarry than a guide. Barnes, by contrast, wrote with an analytic philosopher’s eye, rephrasing the Presocratics in the idiom of arguments and logical reconstruction.
His brilliance lay in showing that these early thinkers could be engaged as philosophers, not just as quaint curiosities. But Barnes’ style also made the Presocratics sound at times like failed analytic metaphysicians, their poetry reduced to awkward premises and conclusions.
Long’s Companion strikes a different note. Because it is a collection of essays, it resists the single interpretive straitjacket. Each contributor brings a slightly different emphasis—philological, historical, conceptual—and the effect is a mosaic that respects the diversity of early Greek thought.
The Companion is less a march of progress toward Plato, and more a chorus of voices struggling with perennial questions: what is reality made of, what is change, how do opposites relate, what is knowledge, how does order emerge from chaos. It also situates the Presocratics within Greek culture more fully than the older treatments: their ties to poetry, religion, medicine, and politics are foregrounded, preventing them from being seen as detached “natural scientists.”
For students, this makes the volume much more approachable than Kirk and Raven, while still more historically textured than Barnes. For scholars, it offers updated debates—about the interpretation of apeiron, about Parmenides’ relation to phenomenology, about Heraclitus’ logos as performative speech. For anyone who cares about philosophy’s origins, it makes vivid why these fragments still matter: they are not just footnotes to Plato, but windows into a time when thought first attempted to wrestle nature and order into concepts, when poetry and reason were still entwined, when the question “what is” was raw and electrifying.
Reading the Companion from start to finish, one feels the alternation between doctrinal exposition and methodological reflection. That rhythm itself is instructive: one moment the reader is tracing Empedocles’ cosmology, the next pondering how much of Empedocles we actually have and how much is Aristotle’s reconstruction.
The volume thereby teaches philosophy and historiography together. It cultivates not just knowledge of what Thales or Democritus supposedly said, but also the critical awareness of how we know and how we interpret. That dual consciousness is perhaps its greatest achievement.
In the end, Long’s Companion does not pretend to be definitive. It does something subtler: it provides a map, but a map that emphasizes terrain, rival paths, and the sheer difficulty of the journey.
Compared with the text-heavy exactitude of Kirk and Raven, and the analytic dissection of Barnes, this volume offers something closer to a cultural and philosophical panorama.
It allows the Presocratics to breathe again as thinkers embedded in their world, whose fragments resonate with myth, poetry, and reason all at once. And for anyone beginning to explore the first philosophers, there could hardly be a more humane, more balanced, or more stimulating guide.
The Presocratics are often seen as a forbidding subject: the fragments are sparse, the language gnomic, the testimonia second-hand and often hostile, and the interpretive traditions contested to the point of trench warfare.
But what this Companion does, chapter by chapter, is to pull away from the reductive label “Pre-Socratic” and to insist that Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, and the rest are philosophers in their own right, grappling with problems whose intensity and originality deserve to be heard without the echo of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thunder drowning them out.
The first set of essays naturally turns to the Milesians: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Here the volume establishes its method. Rather than rehearse the usual “Thales says all is water, Anaximenes says all is air,” the authors stress the context of early cosmology, the attempt to move from mythos to logos, but not in a crude triumphalist story of rationality supplanting superstition. Thales’ claim is less important as a literal doctrine of watery substance than as a methodological gesture: reality can be explained in terms of a single principle, and that principle can be something observable rather than divine caprice.
Anaximander’s apeiron receives particular care: it is neither a fuzzy infinity nor a mystic void, but a conceptual innovation that allows the cosmos to be self-regulating, balancing opposites without needing a divine overseer.
Anaximenes, with his air and rarefaction-condensation scheme, shows the first signs of a physical continuum, a proto-theory of states of matter. The Companion thus foregrounds not the “naïve materialism” often attributed to these figures, but their daring and coherent moves toward systematic accounts of nature.
The transition to Heraclitus and Parmenides is presented as a dramatic confrontation, but the contributors are careful not to caricature them as “flux” versus “being” in a comic-book opposition. Heraclitus’ fragments are read with sensitivity to style: the aphoristic and oracular tone is not accidental, but an integral part of his philosophical method, forcing the reader to engage in a kind of dialectic with the text itself.
The logos, ever present but obscure, is what unites opposites, and the flux is not chaos but ordered transformation. Parmenides, meanwhile, is not treated as a killjoy who declares motion and change impossible, but as a rigorist who pushes the logic of non-contradiction to its utmost.
The Companion’s reading emphasizes that Parmenides inaugurates metaphysics as the inquiry into what can be thought and said without incoherence. His “Way of Truth” is not a metaphysical dogma, but a demonstration of how reason sets boundaries to doxa. The tension between Heraclitus and Parmenides is thereby elevated: not a simple quarrel, but a template for Western philosophy’s dialectic between becoming and being.
From there the focus turns to the Pythagoreans. Here the Companion departs from the older scholarship’s obsession with Pythagoras as a half-mythical sage or cult leader. Instead, the chapter stresses the role of number, ratio, and harmony as metaphysical principles.
The Pythagorean way of embedding mathematics in cosmology is not a primitive version of later science, but a recognition that structure itself has explanatory power. The famous “music of the spheres” is not quaint ornamentation, but a profound attempt to bind together ethics, mathematics, and cosmology under the rubric of order.
The Pythagorean contribution is thus recast as both philosophical and cultural: a model of how philosophy could be lived as a bios, not just written as doctrine.
The pluralists—Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists—are treated as innovators who found ways to escape the Parmenidean prohibition without lapsing into incoherence. Empedocles’ four roots and the twin forces of Love and Strife are presented not as fanciful myth-making but as an ingenious dual explanatory system, allowing both mixture and separation.
The Companion’s treatment is especially strong in drawing out Empedocles’ proto-evolutionary accounts of living beings, his medical theories, and his self-stylization as both seer and scientist. Anaxagoras, by introducing nous as the ordering principle, is shown to reinsert intelligence into cosmology, but not in a crude theistic sense: nous is impersonal, infinite, and the very condition of order.
The Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, are of course given pride of place as precursors to materialism. But rather than casting them as modern mechanists avant la lettre, the essays stress their conceptual daring: the void as real, atoms as infinite and indivisible, phenomena as explicable by configurations. The ethical dimension of Democritus, his reflections on cheerfulness and moderation, receive due emphasis, preventing him from being flattened into a mere proto-physicist.
The volume does not stop at doctrines. A cluster of essays examines the sophists and the intellectual environment in which Socrates emerged. Relativism, rhetoric, the problem of physis versus nomos—these are presented not as sophistries in the pejorative sense, but as serious philosophical challenges.
Protagoras’ man-measure doctrine, Gorgias’ radical skepticism, and the sophistic emphasis on persuasion are treated as provocations that demanded Plato’s and Aristotle’s responses. The Companion resists the Platonic caricature of the sophists as intellectual charlatans, instead showing how they represent philosophy’s engagement with politics, language, and culture.
One of the book’s most valuable sections is its methodological essays. The problem of fragments and doxography is addressed with sober clarity. Since virtually none of the Presocratics’ works survive complete, what we have are quotations, paraphrases, and hostile reports.
The Companion makes explicit how precarious the reconstruction is, how much depends on Aristotle’s categorizations or Simplicius’ commentaries, and how easily modern scholars can be misled by taking these second-hand accounts as transparent. This awareness is not meant to paralyze interpretation, but to instill a critical humility: to read the Presocratics is always to engage with a palimpsest.
The reception chapters extend the story. Plato’s dialogues are shown to be saturated with Presocratic echoes—Parmenides and Heraclitus haunting his metaphysics, the Atomists providing a foil for his Timaeus, the sophists serving as sparring partners.
Aristotle, with his systematic classifications, is presented as both the great preserver and the great distorter: we know the Presocratics largely through his lens, but his scheme of causes and principles also reshapes them to fit his own agenda. Later receptions, from the Hellenistic schools to Renaissance humanists, are traced to show how the Presocratics never ceased to be fertile ground for reimagining philosophy’s origins.
What makes this Companion distinctive, when set against classic introductions like Kirk and Raven’s The Presocratic Philosophers or Jonathan Barnes’
The Presocratic Philosophers, is precisely this pluralism of approach. Kirk and Raven offered a monumental, text-heavy compendium, with Greek and translation side by side, and running commentary that treated the Presocratics as precursors whose main interest was to lay foundations for Plato and Aristotle.
Their work remains indispensable as a sourcebook, but it is more a quarry than a guide. Barnes, by contrast, wrote with an analytic philosopher’s eye, rephrasing the Presocratics in the idiom of arguments and logical reconstruction.
His brilliance lay in showing that these early thinkers could be engaged as philosophers, not just as quaint curiosities. But Barnes’ style also made the Presocratics sound at times like failed analytic metaphysicians, their poetry reduced to awkward premises and conclusions.
Long’s Companion strikes a different note. Because it is a collection of essays, it resists the single interpretive straitjacket. Each contributor brings a slightly different emphasis—philological, historical, conceptual—and the effect is a mosaic that respects the diversity of early Greek thought.
The Companion is less a march of progress toward Plato, and more a chorus of voices struggling with perennial questions: what is reality made of, what is change, how do opposites relate, what is knowledge, how does order emerge from chaos. It also situates the Presocratics within Greek culture more fully than the older treatments: their ties to poetry, religion, medicine, and politics are foregrounded, preventing them from being seen as detached “natural scientists.”
For students, this makes the volume much more approachable than Kirk and Raven, while still more historically textured than Barnes. For scholars, it offers updated debates—about the interpretation of apeiron, about Parmenides’ relation to phenomenology, about Heraclitus’ logos as performative speech. For anyone who cares about philosophy’s origins, it makes vivid why these fragments still matter: they are not just footnotes to Plato, but windows into a time when thought first attempted to wrestle nature and order into concepts, when poetry and reason were still entwined, when the question “what is” was raw and electrifying.
Reading the Companion from start to finish, one feels the alternation between doctrinal exposition and methodological reflection. That rhythm itself is instructive: one moment the reader is tracing Empedocles’ cosmology, the next pondering how much of Empedocles we actually have and how much is Aristotle’s reconstruction.
The volume thereby teaches philosophy and historiography together. It cultivates not just knowledge of what Thales or Democritus supposedly said, but also the critical awareness of how we know and how we interpret. That dual consciousness is perhaps its greatest achievement.
In the end, Long’s Companion does not pretend to be definitive. It does something subtler: it provides a map, but a map that emphasizes terrain, rival paths, and the sheer difficulty of the journey.
Compared with the text-heavy exactitude of Kirk and Raven, and the analytic dissection of Barnes, this volume offers something closer to a cultural and philosophical panorama.
It allows the Presocratics to breathe again as thinkers embedded in their world, whose fragments resonate with myth, poetry, and reason all at once. And for anyone beginning to explore the first philosophers, there could hardly be a more humane, more balanced, or more stimulating guide.
October 16, 2020
The fragmentary remains of Greek philosophers before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle offer tantalizing bursts of insight into the origins of Western philosophy. We call them the Presocratics: an informal and quarrelsome brotherhood of nobles, poets, mystics, bards, warriors, and travelers who were the first to grope for foundational truths of existence not through mystic experience or divine revelation, but through rudimentary deduction and induction. The inquiries they launched hit many a reef, but they began the journey that would lead through Plato and Aristotle to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and our modern world.
This collection of essays by leading scholars in Presocratic studies falls roughly into three sets. First, four essays explore background crucial for understanding these first philosophers: an overview of their general aims, the sources through which their fragments survive, a survey of early cosmology, and the widespread and mystical Pythagoreanism which both repelled and influenced so many early Greek philosophers.
The second set of five essays digs deep on specific philosophers or groups: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomists. The final set of seven essays offers insights into topics such as the interplay of Greek rationality and religion, the tension between moral culpability and legal justice, the impact of the Sophists and rhetoric, and the role of poetry in Greek culture and philosophy.
This work is certainly a collection of academic treatises, and is neither a popular-level history nor a chronological introduction to its topic. On the other hand, it is written with the non-specialist in mind. For example, Greek words are used sparingly, transliterated into English, and explained. The reader will not need to know the Greek alphabet to get through these essays. This is a good book for a reader who has an elementary grasp of the contours of Presocratic philosophy and is ready to dig down one more level.
This collection of essays by leading scholars in Presocratic studies falls roughly into three sets. First, four essays explore background crucial for understanding these first philosophers: an overview of their general aims, the sources through which their fragments survive, a survey of early cosmology, and the widespread and mystical Pythagoreanism which both repelled and influenced so many early Greek philosophers.
The second set of five essays digs deep on specific philosophers or groups: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomists. The final set of seven essays offers insights into topics such as the interplay of Greek rationality and religion, the tension between moral culpability and legal justice, the impact of the Sophists and rhetoric, and the role of poetry in Greek culture and philosophy.
This work is certainly a collection of academic treatises, and is neither a popular-level history nor a chronological introduction to its topic. On the other hand, it is written with the non-specialist in mind. For example, Greek words are used sparingly, transliterated into English, and explained. The reader will not need to know the Greek alphabet to get through these essays. This is a good book for a reader who has an elementary grasp of the contours of Presocratic philosophy and is ready to dig down one more level.
May 20, 2021
My reason for reading this book was only for a backdrop of the philosophy at the time before diving into Plato. If that is your reason for wanting to read this book, I recommend simply reading the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for the Presocratics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pr...
If, however, you have an interest in the presocratics for their own sake, this book is (or at least seems to be) a good fit for you. It has a fairly in-depth discussion on sources, gives notes as to different interpretations for various topics, and is all presented at what might be called a "neutral" perspective.
As stated earlier, it did have a bit more than what I personally was looking for, which caused it to be a bit of a dry read. I still will give it 5 stars because that information is necessary for someone interested in the classics, for instance.
If, however, you have an interest in the presocratics for their own sake, this book is (or at least seems to be) a good fit for you. It has a fairly in-depth discussion on sources, gives notes as to different interpretations for various topics, and is all presented at what might be called a "neutral" perspective.
As stated earlier, it did have a bit more than what I personally was looking for, which caused it to be a bit of a dry read. I still will give it 5 stars because that information is necessary for someone interested in the classics, for instance.
May 8, 2020
This book provided clear and concise background and analysis of pre-Socratic thought. Interesting interpretations where given that I have not seen elsewhere on individual philosophers and philosophical schools. This book also contained chapters on different topics which examined the work of the pre-Socratics as a group, including approaches to early rational theology, epistemology, poetics and rhetoric. Chapters were also devoted to the interplay of the early development and borrowing from medicine and historiographic writing. All in all, I would highly recommend this book to anyone reading pre-Socratic Greek philosophy.
September 5, 2021
A book that offers many (perhaps too many) valuable and useful information about the Presocratic philosophers.
It's always intriguing to read and learn about these ancient thinkers. Most of them lived before Socrates and their main area of thought was the cosmos and its origins.
Some of the chapters of this book are really good and interesting such as the first, introductory one by A.A. Long himself, the chapter about the beginnings of cosmology and the last one about the poetics of early Greek philosophy. Also noteworthy are the chapters about Pythagoras, Heraclitus (many of his fragments are so profound), Parmenides, Zeno (despite its difficulty, it demands a certain mathematical knowledge) and Empedocles and Anaxagoras.
Others chapters however weren't as interesting like the indifferent (but maybe necessary) segment about the sources. I also didn't particularly like the more generic chapters at the end of the book such as the chapters about the sophists, Protagoras and the rhetoric art.
The book isn't an easy reading and most of the analyses are quite hard to grasp, but if you try to stay focused you will at least get the gist of it.
It's always intriguing to read and learn about these ancient thinkers. Most of them lived before Socrates and their main area of thought was the cosmos and its origins.
Some of the chapters of this book are really good and interesting such as the first, introductory one by A.A. Long himself, the chapter about the beginnings of cosmology and the last one about the poetics of early Greek philosophy. Also noteworthy are the chapters about Pythagoras, Heraclitus (many of his fragments are so profound), Parmenides, Zeno (despite its difficulty, it demands a certain mathematical knowledge) and Empedocles and Anaxagoras.
Others chapters however weren't as interesting like the indifferent (but maybe necessary) segment about the sources. I also didn't particularly like the more generic chapters at the end of the book such as the chapters about the sophists, Protagoras and the rhetoric art.
The book isn't an easy reading and most of the analyses are quite hard to grasp, but if you try to stay focused you will at least get the gist of it.
June 19, 2012
Imagine living in a time when significant everyday concepts were up for definition: what is justice? What is truth? Before Plato and Aristotle, the Pre-Socratics were coming up with their arguments.
The book is a collection of scholarly essays ranging from the mundane, "Sources" and the problems with what we have to base our understanding of these early thinkers' ideas, to the more appealing "Early interest in knowledge" and "Soul, sensation and thought."
As Glenn W Most notes in the last chapter, "The poetics of early Greek philosophy" we no longer live in an age when philosophy is written for the average reader. As in this book, modern philosophy is scholarly, designed to be shared amongst academic peers. This book is, therefore, a dense dry read and only worth it if your interest level in the material is high.
The book is a collection of scholarly essays ranging from the mundane, "Sources" and the problems with what we have to base our understanding of these early thinkers' ideas, to the more appealing "Early interest in knowledge" and "Soul, sensation and thought."
As Glenn W Most notes in the last chapter, "The poetics of early Greek philosophy" we no longer live in an age when philosophy is written for the average reader. As in this book, modern philosophy is scholarly, designed to be shared amongst academic peers. This book is, therefore, a dense dry read and only worth it if your interest level in the material is high.
June 21, 2015
a great book！it may seem difficult to fledgelings like me， but it is really informative and provoking. it is interesting that different authors have different views about certain sentences of heraclitus，parmenides， and empedocles.
May 24, 2011
An Insightful collection of scholarly papers on all aspects of early Greek philosophy. Apart from introducing the major figures, it is an in-depth treatment of the subject.
April 5, 2016
Só li a primeira metade, direcionada à cada filósofo em particular.
A parte temática transversal ficará pra outra hora.
A parte temática transversal ficará pra outra hora.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews