Kevin’s Reviews > Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition > Status Update

Read back through these past several chapters the last two days, the summa leading up to the authors denouement. Im impressed with the quality of the scholarship and the importance of his subject. So much was so obvious, for someone whose mind hadn’t been poisoned by 2500 years of sanitized history, that it was hard to digest, initially, just how controversial and well documented his arguments actually are.

Sigh . . . Yeah, better and better as he goes along. This book challenges a wide span of scholarly consensus, in some very persuasive ways.

As the plot thickens, this read gets better and better. The way that the author recreates the ancient Pythagorean tradition of Philolaus through Christian, Arabic and Mediaeval sources against the corruptive mis-readings of the Platonic and Aristotelian schools is exciting and very well constructed. I am thoroughly impressed with these last few chapters.

The argument is more impressive and far-reaching the more it is revealed.

The argument is more impressive and far-reaching the more it is revealed.

Just reread this ‘Wise Men and Women’ chapter and realized part of what I’m contending with. I have no academic background in any of this. The prejudice that Kingsley is fighting against here is foreign to me, and my introduction to this study is through many of his less dogmatic sources. So the pains that he’s going through to lay the foundation for his argument comes off as gratuitous sometimes.

I’m digging this read, a lot. But one of the challenges for me, is that I’ve studied a number of these themes from a different angle already, and have drawn certain conclusions about them. His move here, of making the Orphic/Hermetic Crater a terrestrial Crater works well for his Platonic/Pythagorean purpose, but for good reasons, I struggle with that as an universally historic truth.

Chapter 10 was a powerhouse! I’m intrigued by the argument relating to the sub-terranean “great chasm”, interpreting it as an Orphic reworking of a Hesiodic theme. There doesn’t seem to be any discussion there of the Hesiodic “Chaos”, which, unless I’m missing something, is the root for both the wording as well as the concept. I need to find this work by Solmsen, “Chaos and ‘Apierion’”.