The focus of this paper will be on the earliest Greek treatments of impulse, motivation, and self-animation – a cluster of concepts tied to the hormē-conatus concept. I hope to offer a plausible ...account of how the earliest recorded views on this subject in mythological, pre-Socratic, and Classical writings might have inspired later philosophical developments by establishing the foundations for an organic, wholly naturalized approach to human inquiry. Three pillars of that approach which I wish to emphasize are: practical intelligence (i.e., a continuity between knowing and doing), natural normativity (i.e., a continuity between human norms and the environment), and an ontology of philosophical dialectic (i.e., a continuity between the growth of human understanding and the growth of physis).
This fascinating volume rethinks the relationship between early Greek philosophers and the epic poet Hesiod, by presenting fifteen studies that offer different perspectives on matters of style, ...genre, intertextuality and the history of ideas.
When we talk about Presocratic philosophy, we are speaking about the origins of Greek philosophy and Western rationality itself. But what exactly does it mean to talk about "Presocratic philosophy" ...in the first place? How did early Greek thinkers come to be considered collectively as Presocratic philosophers? In this brief book, André Laks provides a history of the influential idea of Presocratic philosophy, tracing its historical and philosophical significance and consequences, from its ancient antecedents to its full crystallization in the modern period and its continuing effects today.
Laks examines ancient Greek and Roman views about the birth of philosophy before turning to the eighteenth-century emergence of the term "Presocratics" and the debates about it that spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He analyzes the intellectual circumstances that led to the idea of Presocratic philosophy-and what was and is at stake in the construction of the notion. The book closes by comparing two models of the history of philosophy-the phenomenological, represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the rationalist, represented by Ernst Cassirer-and their implications for Presocratic philosophy, as well as other categories of philosophical history. Other figures discussed include Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, and J.-P. Vernant.
Challenging standard histories of Presocratic philosophy, the book calls for a reconsideration of the conventional story of early Greek philosophy and Western rationality.
•Early archaic medicine and therapy were related to the hieratic/supernatural conception.•.The pre-socratics put in this the genesis and causes of everything, and this is reflected in all the known ...sciences of the time and in medicine•With Plato, in essence, we are witnessing the penetration of medicine into rhetoric, but turning our attention to the Hippocratic corpus we cannot ignore the opposite.•Aristotle lays the foundations for a scientific (epistème) methodology approach.•In the classical world, doctors integrate with the philosophical currents and create the various schools, and so Hippocrates was the first to lay the foundations of rational medicine combined with ethical values.
At the beginning, medicine in the Western world was based on a theocratic-magical doctrine with religious beliefs and mythical conflicts. Subsequently, in the Greek world begins the relationship between rhetoric, philosophy and medicine with mutual influences and contributions. This relationship is due to the assumption that, as the philosophical logos acts on the soul, so the medicine with its techniques and its remedies acts on the body. However, the relationship between philosophy and medicine will begin with the pre-socratics as they try to find standard patterns/rules that can be successfully applied for the explanation of the whole. To achieve this, they cannot resort to the use of reasoned production methods or to complete and perfect induction.
We performed an extensive bibliographical research to investigate the evolutionary process of medical thought from late antiquity to modern age. For this purpose we extracted data from electronic data banks and ancient books from public libraries and private collections.
Despite the individual differences of the representatives of the philosophical currents, their unity is verified by a common component in their way of thinking. Thus, they initiate a change in the way they look at and interpret the world, a change characterized by a persistent search for universal truth and knowledge per se with a distinct intention of rationality. This knowledge now meets the doctors at that era and Hippocrates is the first to take away the part of the theocratic medical doctrine, making it rational and therefore science.
There is an extremely interesting aspect of Aristotle's relationship with medicine. In his attempt to construct the method of his ethical philosophy, Aristotle took medicine as his model. However, this correlation of Medicine with Philosophy had occurred before Aristotle with Plato. In fact, we perceive the analogy between the work of the doctor who takes care of the body and that of the philosopher whose work is the care of the soul in Gorgias and Phaedrus. The philosopher Plato as an idealist puts the idea of good, like all other ideas, in a transcendental world instead Aristotle builds his moral philosophy on his interest in man, and consequently on “human good”. Thus, medicine reborn as a science from philosophy and therefore the physician must be at first a philosopher to be an epistemologist.
The papyri transmit a part of the testimonia relevant to pre-Socratic philosophy. The 'Corpus dei Papiri Filosofici' takes this material only partly into account. In this volume, a team of ...specialists discusses some of the most important papyrological texts that are major instruments for reconstructing pre-Socratic philosophy and doxography. Furthermore, these texts help to increase our knowledge of how pre-Socratic thought – through contributions to physics, cosmology, ethics, ontology, theology, anthropology, hermeneutics, and aesthetics – paved the way for the canonic scientific fields of European culture. More specifically, each paper tackles (published and unpublished) papyrological texts concerning the Orphics, the Milesians, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the early Atomists, and the Sophists. For the first time in the field of pre-Socratics studies, several papers are devoted to the Herculanean sources, along with others concerning the Graeco-Egyptian papyri and the Derveni Papyrus.
Advocates of the questioning of the dominant anthropocentric perspective of the world have been increasingly strongly presenting (bio)ethical demands for a new solution of the relationship between ...humans and other beings, saying that adherence to the Western philosophical and theological traditions has caused the current environmental, and not just environmental, crisis. The attempts are being made to establish a new relationship by relativizing the differences between man and the non-human living beings, often by attributing specifically human traits and categories, such as dignity, moral status and rights to non-human living beings. The author explores antecedents of the standpoints that deviate from the mainstream Western philosophy, in terms of non-anthropocentric extension of ethics, and finds them in the fragments of first physicists, which emphasize kinship of all varieties of life. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus, in this context, considered certain animals and plants as sacred, i.e. they believed that they are, in a sense, responsible for what they do and that they apart from being able to be driven by a natural desire, being able to breathe, feel, be sad and happy, also have a soul, power of discernment, awareness, the ability to think, understanding and mind. Finally, the author believes that solutions or mitigation of the mentioned crisis are not in the simple Aesopeian levelling of animals and plants "upwards", but in an adequate paideutic approach which in humans will develop an inherent (bio)ethical model of accepting non-human living beings as creatures who deserve moral and decent treatment and respect.
In his attempt to liquidate Kant’s apriorism and to identify the genesis of the pure forms of thought in the form of commodities and coinage, Sohn-Rethel located a first instance of such a ...transformation among ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosophers. In particular, in Parmenides’ notion of “being”, he saw a reflection of the materiality of the coinage that was emerging at that time. This article shows the extent to which Sohn-Rethel’s theory, which has been heavily criticized not least for separating production from the exchange of goods, is still viable and can inspire further research.
The use of etymology is an essential characteristic of the writing of Martin Heidegger. Believing that ordinary language had lost its power to express certain philosophical ideas, Heidegger often ...looked to earlier meanings of words or parsed derived words in order to analyze separate morphemes. An appreciation of this approach is central in understanding Heidegger's work. He also believed that etymologizing was essential in interpreting the works of the writers to whom he felt most akin: Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. These early Greek thinkers were clearly using language in a new way, and many of their works exist only in fragments. The meanings of particular words and phrases is thus often unclear, and it is possible that etymology could provide some indication of the writer's intention. Many of Heidegger's etymologies, however, are far from standard and are used to produce novel and often unusual interpretations. The present paper will review a number of Heidegger's etymologies (of varying authenticity), the manner in which he arrived at them, and their import in the interpretation of certain texts. The general question will then be taken up concerning the legitimate uses and abuses of etymology in such interpretation.
A celebrated study of the origins of ancient Greek philosophy, now in English for the first time
How can we talk about the beginnings of philosophy today? How can we avoid the conventional opposition ...of mythology and the dawn of reason and instead explore the multiple styles of thought that emerged between them? In this acclaimed book, available in English for the first time, Maria Michela Sassi reconstructs the intellectual world of the early Greek "Presocratics" to provide a richer understanding of the roots of what used to be called "the Greek miracle."
The beginnings of the long process leading to philosophy were characterized by intellectual diversity and geographic polycentrism. In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, between the Asian shores of Ionia and the Greek city-states of southern Italy, thinkers started to reflect on the cosmic order, elaborate doctrines on the soul, write in solemn Homeric meter, or, later, abandon poetry for an assertive prose. And yet the Presocratics whether the Milesian natural thinkers, the rhapsode Xenophanes, the mathematician and "shaman" Pythagoras, the naturalist and seer Empedocles, the oracular Heraclitus, or the inspired Parmenides all shared an approach to critical thinking that, by questioning traditional viewpoints, revolutionized knowledge.
A unique study that explores the full range of early Greek thinkers in the context of their worlds, the book also features a new introduction to the English edition in which the author discusses the latest scholarship on the subject.
El presente trabajo de investigación pretende ahondar en el pensamiento político de Agustín García Calvo y, en concreto, mostrar la recepción que ha tenido su interpretación de los pensadores ...presocráticos en la vida política española. La investigación se articula en torno a tres momentos: en primer lugar, se estudia la labor hermenéutica de los pensadores presocráticos y de la lógica que fundamenta su discurso por parte de García Calvo. A continuación, y partiendo del análisis de algunos conceptos clave de García Calvo, se intenta mostrar la influencia que los pensadores presocráticos tuvieron en su pensamiento político. Por último, se investiga el impacto ejercido por alguno de esos conceptos en partidos políticos, sindicatos y movimientos sociales situados a la izquierda del espectro político español.
PDF
