Pochwała człowieka poszukującego w monografii D. Kuboka pt. "Krytycyzm, sceptycyzm i zetetycyzm we wczesnej filozofii greckiej", Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2021.

One should know that war is common, that justice is strife, that all things come about in accordance with strife and with what must be. Heraclitus1 Are we being duped by language? The words and phr...

Early Greek Philosophy - Early Greek Philosophy. By J. Burnet. Third Edition. A. and C. Black, Ltd., 1920.

Book Reviews An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy: The Chief Fragments and Ancient Testimony, with Connecting Commentary. By John Mansley Robinson. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968. Pp. x+342. $4.25. Paper.) This is a book that fills a long-standing need and does it well. In the past, the teacher of a survey course in the history of ancient philosophy who wished to cover the pre-Socratics more fully than is done in one of the several anthologies of Greek philosophy had awkward options. The most up-to-date and authoritative of the textbooks , G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven's The Presocratic Philosophers, is too forbidding for a course at the sophomore-junior level. John Burnet's classic, Early Greek Philosophy , still unsurpassed in the quality of translation, puts one-sided emphasis on the scientific character of early Greek philosophy. Besides, neither Kirk-Raven nor Burner cover the Sophists (Burnet not even Democritus). Kathleen Freeman's Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (a translation of the B sections in Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker) has the virtue that it gives the student a forceful and graphic impression of the scantiness of actual fragments; but the student is likely to feel more bewildered than challenged. As for the anthologies devoted specifically to the preSocratic .s, Milton C. Nahm's Selections from Early Greek Philosophy is badly dated, and PhiLip Wheelwright's The Presocratics takes excessive liberties with translation. Robinson's book now affords an excellent choice. The selection of primary source materials for the whole sequence from Ionians to Sophists is adequate to generous. Beyond this, Robinson has included about fifty passages--from Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, the historians, the tragic poets, Aristophanes, and the Hippocratic writings--that are interesting for their philosophic content or as suggestive paraI1eis. Robinson's translations of the fragments are, on the whole, precise and sensitive (I mention below some lapses that I have noticed). His introductory and connecting comments are lucid, wellinformed , and discreeL The book starts with a twenty-page chapter on Hesiod in which equal attention is given to the Theogony and to Works and Days. Robinson does not let go of the moral-anthropological strain when he turns to the early philosophers. In the case of the atomists he devotes hill chapters to "Macrocosm" and "Microcosm," respectively. He concludes with fifty pages, under the section heading '~I'he Unseating of Zeus," on the three-sided confrontation of Sophistic, traditional, and Socratic values in the late fifth century. The choice of texts and the explanations offered in this section bring out forcefully the truth of Robinson's epitomizing observation: "Plato saw further. He saw that in an important sense the teaching of the sophists was merely an expression of conventional morality itself.... In the teaching of the sophist the prudential morality of Hesiod has come home to roost" (p. 275). Cosmology and epistemology are, of course, the major themes of the book; but the chapters on Hesiod, Democritean ethics, and the Sophists could also be read profitably in courses in Greek ethics, classical civilization, or as background in a course on Plato. The usefulness of the book as a textbook is enhanced by a substantial yet wisely selective, "Bibliographical Essay," a "Note on the Sources," an index, maps, and [459] 460 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY illustrative figures and diagrams. The editing and design are very good. All ancient texts are printed as prose extracts, and the fragments are given additional prominence by being printed in boldface. References have been assembled at the end of the book, but Robinson has consistently shown good judgment in mentioning the source in his text in cases where this information would be specially relevant. An aid the book unfortunately does not have (it would be wise to supply this in future editions) is a concordance of Robinson's numbering of the fragments against the more familiar numbering of Diels-Kranz. The teacher (or the student who finds a reference in another book) must now thumb through the book or check through a whole reference section to spot a fragment or testimonium he knows by its B or A number in DielsKranz . I have two more critical...

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...

Reviewed by: The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics ed. by Daniel W. Graham Phillip Sidney Horky Daniel W. Graham, ed. and trans. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics. Parts 1 and 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvii + 1020 pp. Cloth, $180; paper, $99. It has been nearly 30 years since Malcolm Schofield revised and updated the first edition of the venerable translation of fragments of the Presocratic philosophers by J. E. Raven and G. S. Kirk, originally compiled in 1957 in the wake of the sixth and final edition of Diels-Kranz’s (DK) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin 1951–52). And in the time since Kirk-Raven-Schofield’s second edition of The Presocratic Philosophers (KRS), in 1983, several translations of selected portions of the collected fragments of early Greek philosophy into English have appeared: Jonathan Barnes’ Early Greek Philosophy (London 1987), drawn from his revised edition of The Presocratic Philosophers (London 1982), Robin Waterfield’s The First Philosophers (Oxford 2000), and Richard McKirahan’s Philosophy Before Socrates (Indianapolis, Ind. 2011). Students of Presocratic philosophy and the early intellectual history of Greece have profited immensely from the contributions made by KRS, Barnes, Waterfield, and McKirahan. Yet none of these volumes, despite their intellectual courage, philosophical acumen, and deep learning, could provide what Diels and Kranz had given German audiences in the middle of the twentieth century: a bilingual translation of the complete fragments of and selected testimonia concerning those important intellectual antecedents of Plato (including the Sophists). On the eve of Professor Schofield’s retirement, then, Daniel W. Graham has produced a two-volume translation and commentary on the complete fragments and selected testimonies of the “major Presocratics.” It should be mentioned that this is not an easy or even enviable project. Presocratic studies has undergone a renaissance of sorts since the last edition of KRS in 1983, and new critical editions and translations into English of individual figures (J. Lesher’s Xenophanes of Colophon [Toronto 1992]; C. A. Huffman’s editions of Philolaus of Croton [Cambridge 1993] and Archytas of Tarentum [Cambridge 2005]; the editions of Anaxagoras by P. Curd [Toronto 2007] and D. Sider [Sankt Augustin 2005]; C. C. W. Taylor’s The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus [Toronto 1999]; G. J. Pendrick’s Antiphon the Sophist [Cambridge 2002]); new editions of papyrus discoveries (A. Martin and O. Primavesi’s L’Empédocle de Strasbourg [Berlin 1999], incorporated into B. Inwood’s The Poem of Empedocles [Toronto 2001] and the long-awaited “official” text of The Derveni Papyrus by T. Kouremenos, G. Parássoglou, and K. Tsantsanoglou [Firenze 2006]); and major critical studies [End Page 149] of Presocratic philosophers and/or philosophy (too numerous to name here) have significantly modified the landscape of the study of early Greek philosophy. In the midst of this renaissance, one has seen the critical approaches used to evaluate Presocratic thought develop into a perfect storm, with a barrage of new approaches concerning historiography, interpretation, reception, and contextualization, now considered legitimate in the assessment and evaluation of those thorny and often obscure fragments of the early Greek speculators. Presocratic studies has become contested ground, and the idea of producing a two-volume set that might update, stabilize, and make DK accessible for an English-reading audience, despite the protestations of the few (xiii), must be considered nothing less than wholly welcome. Given his demonstrated comprehension of the field of Presocratic studies at large—he has produced two broad-ranging monographs, edited several general volumes, and offered many article-length contributions on early Greek philosophy—Graham would seem to be the perfect choice for the job. What remains to be seen, then, is whether the volumes as we have them rise to the challenge of the project. The results, I think, are mixed. I will first discuss those aspects of The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy that seem more successful and testify to the value that such a collection offers to educators and students alike. Then I will examine some areas where the volumes do not quite reach the heights promised by the...

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490–c. 420 BCE), a Greek philosopher, famous for his invention of sophistry as a profession. According to ancient testimonies he published some literary works, but nothing is preserved. The present publication contains a collection of scant doxographic evidence about Protagoras’ life and writings. The evidences are based on A. Lask and G. Most’ Early Greek Philosophy (2016).

Our primary interest in what follows will be in thinking about early Greek philosophers' views on such topics as the nature and origins of the world, our knowledge of it and how we should act within it. We shall also be interested in thinking about the arguments they offered for these conclusions. But there are some crucial questions and difficulties to be addressed before we can begin, since they bear on the nature of our evidence for early Greek philosophy and the nature of the context in which the early Greek philosophers lived and worked. These factors shaped first the production and then, in turn, the transmission of the philosophy we shall go on to consider, and therefore deserve to be given serious attention. What is “Presocratic” philosophy'? What does this book include and what does it leave out? The term “Presocratic” is a modern classii cation not found in the ancient sources themselves and, although it is still commonly used, some scholars have argued that it ought to be allowed to fall into disuse. Not only is it chronologically inaccurate, since some of those philosophers usually classii ed as “Presocratic” were contemporaries of Socrates and others, notably Democritus, probably outlived him, but it is potentially misleading in other ways. A full account of all Greek thought in the period up to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE would include a far wider cast of characters than do standard accounts of Presocratic philosophy.

When studying the early Greek philosophers, it is usually not enough to recur solely to fragments. Testimonies are useful and sometimes key in order to reconstitute their doctrines. However, dealing with testimonies — and our major source of testimonies is Aristotle and the peripatetic tradition — may be tricky. Harold Cherniss's Aristotle's criticism of presocratic philosophy (1935) was a major milestone in the study of Aristotle's transmission of the doctrines of his Preplatonic predecessors. Cherniss's critics, however, have been hard over his reading of Aristotle. If Aristotle distorts presocratic doctrines intentionally, as Cherniss's critics charge him of accusing Aristotle, then it would be too risky to use Aristotle as a source. If he intentionally distorts his predecessors, we should expect him to do everything he can to hide all traces of it. However, if he is sincere, the so-called distortions may seem so because he cannot avoid seeing his predecessors through his own lenses. In this paper, I analyze three paradigmatic types of criticism raised against Cherniss: the one that aims to safeguard Aristotle's reliability as a source for early Greek philosophy, the one intended to safeguard his right to the title of historian, and another one that rejects both discussions as shadowing Aristotle's philosophical activity. Even if some of Cherniss's conclusions about the doctrines of the early Greek philosophers may seem outdated, his general method stands valid: Aristotle's testimony should be approached in a careful and systematic way in order to remove his misinterpretations and eventual distortions. The three types of criticism analyzed, however, do not seem to touch the kernel of this method. On the contrary, they seem to agree with the basic premises, but somehow insist that Cherniss's criticism is out of place.

Part I looks on the movement of Western thought as a falling apart of the primordial Event of physis-is-logos, beginning with the Early Greek philosophers and ending with Aristotle, and as a concealed re-entry of this Event into Western thought at the beginning of the modern era. This Event reaches its full disclosure in the philosophy of Heidegger. This falling apart, re-entry, and disclosure is the Ordinance — the ‘essentiation’ of history — as far as it rules the thought of thinkers.

Gorgias (483–375 BCE), a famous Ancient Greek philosopher and orator. According to ancient testimonies he was praised for his eloquence and published numerous literary works, but very little is preserved. The present publication contains a collection of scant doxographic evidence about Gorgias’ life and writings and a translation of two his extant speeches The Encomium on Helen and the Apologia of Palamedes. The evidences are based on A. Laks and G. Most’ Early Greek Philosophy (2016).

Background. This study examines the concept "enemy" in early Greek philosophy through a textual analysis of pre-Socratic thinkers, particularly Heraclitus and Democritus. In light of contemporary global and local challenges that prompt a reconsideration of enmity as a phenomenon, the relevance of this research has significantly increased. The focus is placed on the semantics and terminology employed by ancient Greek philosophers to describe the enemy, including terms such as ἐχθρός, πολέμιος, δυσμενής, ἔρις, and πόλεμος. Lexical analysis of these terms reveals their meaning within the context of social and ontological concepts and their influence on the development of the ancient philosophical tradition. Methods. The methodology combines philological analysis of texts, comparison of linguistic and stylistic features, and reconstruction of the cultural and historical context in which these ideas emerged. Ηermeneutic, descriptive and structural analyses uncover the multifaceted representations of the enemy. Results. The findings suggest that the perception of the enemy in early Greek philosophy transcends personal conflict, integrating social, moral, and ontological dimensions. This deeper understanding of enmity highlights its dual role as a destructive force in society and a harmonizing element through oppositions. The uniqueness of the Greek tradition lies in its ability to incorporate struggle as a necessary aspect of cosmic order and social dynamics. These conclusions are significant both for contemporary humanitarian discourse and for further exploration of the history of philosophy. Conclusions. The study demonstrates that the concept "enemy" in early Greek philosophy possesses a multifaceted nature, encompassing ontological, anthropological, and social dimensions. In Heraclitus' works, the enemy is portrayed as an ontological principle of harmony achieved through the conflict of opposites, which structures the cosmos. Conversely, Democritus emphasizes the anthropological dimension, where enmity is not only a social phenomenon but also a moral challenge that requires internal harmony and self-control. The analysis reveals that the terms denoting the enemy have significant semantic depth and reflect the interrelation between lexicon, stylistics, and philosophical concepts. These findings expand the understanding of ancient philosophy, emphasizing enmity as both a destructive and constructive element in cosmic and social order.

Antiphon (c. 480–411 BCE) was famous in antiquity for his forensic speeches as well as more theoretical works, such as The Truth and On concord. He is also credited with the invention of logography as a profession. The majority of his heritage is now lost. The present publication contains a collection of scant doxographic evidence about Antiphon’s life and writings. The evidences are based on A. Lask and G. Most’ Early Greek Philosophy (2016).

T HE interpretation of Plato's philosophy presented in the following pages accepts the position that each of Plato's dialogues may be used as evidence of his own thought at the time he wrote it. He clearly did not accept all the doctrines which he put in the mouths of his principal speakers; yet these doctrines indicate the chief subjects of his philosophical speculation, without confining his thought to a rigid system. I use the chronology of the dialogues as it is now almost universally accepted, and on the basis of this chronology I differentiate between an earlier and a later Platonism. It is not possible to demonstrate the validity of this position; it is justified only in so far as it makes possible a coherent formulation of Plato's philosophy. Causation may be described as a relatioxi of which one term produces or determines the existence or character of the other term. The concept of a cause was first formulated not long before the time of Plato. In the earliest Greek literature the word a'lrLos is used in reference to responsibility, usually with the added connotation of blame.' The extension of the notion of responsibility to all the objects and events of experience marks the beginning of the study of causation. The early Greek philosophers, so far as we know, did not speak specifically of causes; yet their systems may be considered as

Ancient Greek philosophy began with natural philosophy. From Thales to Parmenides and Zeno, early Greek philosophers debated the ultimate nature of the world, striving for general principles by which to account for nature similar to those developed by mathematicians to explain geometrical relationships. The first philosopher, Thales, claimed that transformations from solid to liquid states held the key to natural change, and speculated that liquids were the ultimate substance of all things. Self-conscious use of rational reasoning to raise and solve challenging problems is, perhaps, the source of the great achievement of the classical period of Greek philosophy, in which Aristotle’s logic codified reasoning from general principles. Equally memorable, and still intellectually disturbing, is the use of the method by the early Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea, to demonstrate that contradictions flow from accepting the reality of visible things that are indefinitely divisible into many parts.

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The development of Aristotle's theory of the classification of animals 2. Right and left in Greek philosophy 3. Who is attacked in On Ancient Medicine? 4. Experiment in early Greek philosophy and medicine 5. Popper versus Kirk: a controversy in the interpretation of Greek science 6. The social background of early Greek philosophy and science 7. Greek cosmologies 8. Alcmaeon and the early history of dissection 9. The Hippocratic question 10. The empirical basis of the physiology of the Parva Naturalia 11. Saving the appearances 12. The debt of Greek philosophy and science to the ancient Near East 13. Observational error in later Greek science 14. Plato on mathematics and nature, myth and science 15. Science and morality in Greco-Roman antiquity 16. Aristotle's zoology and his metaphysics: the status quaestionis: a critical review of some recent theories 17. Galen on Hellenistics and Hippocrateans 18. The invention of nature Index of passages cited General index.