Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
The Texts of Early
Greek Philosophers, The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies
of the Major Presocratics
by Daniel Graham, Cambridge University Press, 2010
Reviewed by Tiberiu Popa
Almost everyone knows something about
Plato's and Aristotle's respective doctrines, but many tend to
forget that their theories were partly intended to be responses to
the views set forth by earlier philosophers. This book, exploring
those earlier thinkers, is one of the most complete collections of
Presocratic texts (in the original and in translation). These texts
have been preserved in fragmentary form or have survived
indirectly, through various summaries and paraphrases; therefore,
it takes a considerable amount of insight and of textual archeology
to plausibly reconstruct the overall outline of those original
writings or the functions and semantic spheres of many seminal
concepts - and, indeed, that is one of the chief qualities of this
book. Its first volume is devoted mainly to natural philosophers,
although quite a few of them made lasting contributions to what we
would call today metaphysics (for instance, Parmenides) and
epistemology (e.g., Heraclitus). The second volume includes texts
by or pertaining to the Sophists (some of the 'Presocratics', we
shouldn't forget, were actually contemporaries of Socrates).To each
Presocratic thinker Daniel Graham has devoted a section including a
general introduction, a virtually exhaustive set of fragments (and
/ or testimonies offered by later authors), a succinct but very
helpful commentary, and a detailed bibliography. Anyone interested
in the very origins of philosophy and of science will appreciate
the expertise elegantly displayed in these two volumes.
- Tiberiu Popa is Associate Professor of Mathematics Philosophy
at Butler University.