Presocratic Philosophy

Abstract

The word “Presocratic” was invented in the 19th century ce and does not represent a category recognized in antiquity. The expression “Presocratic philosophy” is misleading: first, because some “Presocratics” were Socrates’ contemporaries, some of them surviving him by decades, and second, because they did not call themselves philosophers and because the fields of inquiry they practiced extend far beyond what we think of as philosophy. Nevertheless, the label “Presocratic” is commonly applied to the intellectual figures of the 6th and 5th centuries bce (and a few that lived into the 4th) who dwelt in the Greek-speaking lands from what is now coastal Turkey to Sicily and who are included in this bibliography. Evidence of the influence of Presocratic thought on other areas of culture than philosophy is found in texts ranging from historical and rhetorical works to tragedy and comedy and beyond, to the Hippocratic medical writings and the Derveni Papyrus. Since no original texts of the Presocratics survive entirely, our knowledge of them is based on quotations (“fragments”) from their works and on reports (“testimonia”) about their views, lives, and writings in other authors whose works have been transmitted. Presocratic philosophy is the earliest phase of Greek philosophy; Plato and Aristotle were strongly influenced by the Presocratics and recognized them as their intellectual predecessors. The subsequent interest in the Presocratics in antiquity and in consequence our knowledge of them is largely due to Aristotle. In more recent times, systematic study of them began in the 19th century. Diels’s Doxographi Graeci (Diels 1879, cited under Source Criticism) for the first time permitted a rational reconstruction of much of the testimonial material, and Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Diels and Kranz 1952, cited under Collections of Source Materials; first published in 1903) provided a collection of fragments and testimonia that brought the study of the Presocratics within the range of students and nonspecialist scholars of philosophy, classics, and the history of science. The study of “Presocratic philosophy” has traditionally extended to more subjects than we commonly consider philosophical. It includes topics not only in method, logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, cognition, cosmology, and “psychology”—here meaning views about the nature of the psuchē (frequently translated “soul”)—but also examines connections with science and mathematics, and a variety of social practices. Recently this tendency has further expanded to include religious and mystical beliefs and practices, while by no means excluding the philosophical and scientific aspects of Presocratic thought, which remain the dominant topics of research.