Beyond Diels-Kranz: The New Loeb Early Greek Philosophy

Abstract

Beyond Diels-Kranz: The New Loeb Early Greek Philosophy JOHN PALMER The publication of a Loeb Classical Library edition of the evidence for early Greek philosophy is a major event in classical scholarship.* In these nine volumes, running to well over 4,000 pages, André Laks and Glenn Most undertake to present in an accessible format the principal evidence for the Greek philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries BC. They have been assisted in this massive project by Gérard Journée, Leopoldo Iribarren, and David Lévystone, who receive special credit on the title page; by several scholars who have provided special assistance in the preparation and translation of texts in Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew; and by numerous others who have provided comments on individual chapters or who have been consulted on particular points. The editors and their assistants are to be commended for their exemplary execution of such a vast and difficult task. They have succeeded in producing what is far and away the best available edition of the texts of the early Greek philosophers with accompanying English translation. (With the simultaneous publication of Les débuts de la philosophie: Des premiers penseurs grecs à Socrate [Paris: Éditions Fayard, 2016], they have also produced the best edition with accompanying French translation.) More than that, their edition effectively supersedes Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, which has long held sway as the standard edition of the Presocratics, *André Laks and Glenn W. Most (eds. and trans.), Early Greek Philosophy. 9 volumes. Loeb Classical Library 524–32. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. arion 25.3 winter 2018 but it only does so because Laks and Most have respectfully taken Diels-Kranz as their model. The collection is not without its flaws, some of which will be addressed here, but these are mostly negligible in comparison with its innumerable merits. Laks and Most have set such a high standard with this work that it is hard to imagine that we will see a better general collection on early Greek philosophy in our lifetimes. Laks and Most generally avoid referring to their subject as “Presocratic” philosophy. The term “Vorsokratiker,” first employed in Johann August Eberhard’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie (Halle, 1788), was eventually used by Hermann Diels to demarcate, not a chronological period of philosophy prior to Socrates, but that constellation of early thinkers whose mode of philosophical activity was not influenced by Socrates and the changes he wrought to philosophy’s self-conception. “Presocratic” philosophy for Diels was thus roughly equivalent to the phase of ancient philosophy prior to the rise of the philosophical schools. Nonetheless, the term is awkward and has unwelcome temporal and historiographic connotations, rightly noted by Laks and Most. Not all the figures in these volumes were active before Socrates, nor is it historically accurate to contrast them all with a “Socratic” approach to philosophy, despite Cicero’s famously influential characterization of Socrates as having brought philosophy down from the heavens to earth (Cic. Tusc. V 4.10–11). Laks has very usefully discussed both the ancient antecedents and modern deployment of the notion of “Presocratic” philosophy in his Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique” (Paris 2006), now translated by Glenn Most as The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy (Princeton 2018). Laks’s conclusion there that the common history of the transmission and survival of their writings is one of the least contestable criteria of an otherwise problematic identity serves as background to the editors ’ characterization of the object of the present volumes as the philosophers prior to Plato “who are transmitted in the form of fragments” (vol. i, p. 7). The collection’s entire first volume is devoted to introduc188 beyond diels-kranz tory and reference materials. Included are a preface explaining the organizational and editorial principles governing the presentation; a list of abbreviations; a more general bibliography than the ones provided in the introductions to individual chapters; a two-way concordance between Laks and Most’s set of textual identifiers and those employed in DielsKranz ; a useful index of references in the collection to the early Greek philosophers outside the chapters devoted to them, followed by a more...