Presocratic Research Articles

Yin and Yang , and the Hot and the Cold

Yin and Yang are important concepts in ancient Chinese philosophy. Western scholars have become more familiar with these two concepts recently, but for a long time almost no one considered comparing them with their own tradition such as the ancient Greek philosophy, and especially with the ideas of the Hot and the Cold in Presocratic philosophy. In this paper, I make an attempt to do exactly that, and especially make a detailed comparison between the thoughts of two ancient thinkers: Laozi and Anaximander. I discuss the thought of Yin and Yang in Laozi—who was the earliest philosopher making use of the concepts Yin and Yang —to express his cosmological thought in ancient Chinese philosophy. Comparatively, I discuss the ideas of the Hot and the Cold in Anaximander, the earlier among Presocratic philosophers referring to the Hot and the Cold as fundamental concepts used to establish his cosmological system. Through this comparison, I indicate that the similarity between ancient Chinese and Western traditions is far more significant than what people are used to imagining.

The Early Middle Ages of Samuel Beckett

Beckett's investigations in the history of philosophy are well represented in his notebooks of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which provide a close record of his reading in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, as well as in history, literature, and psychology. Numerous scholars – Daniella Caselli, Anthony Uhlmann, Dirk Van Hulle, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman among others – have carefully delineated the relationship between Beckett's note-taking and his deployment of philosophical sources in his literary texts. Whilst the focus quite rightly tends to fall on Beckett's absorption of Presocratic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophy, there are important strands of early medieval philosophy that find expression in his literary work. The philosophy notes housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, provide insights into Beckett's reading in medieval philosophy, drawing almost exclusively from Wilhelm Windelband's History of Philosophy. The epoch spanning from Augustine to Abelard saw central concepts in theology and metaphysics develop in sophistication, such as matters of divine identity and non-identity, the metaphysics of light, and the nature of sin. The influence of the Eastern Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Maximus the Confessor) on Western metaphysics finds expression in the figuration of light and its relation to knowing and unknowing. This eastern theological inflection is evident in the ‘Dream’ Notebook, where Beckett's notes demonstrate his careful reading of William Inge's Christian Mysticism. These influences are expressed most prominently in various themes and allusions in his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, and Watt. The formal experiments and narrative self-consciousness of these early novels also respond to the early medieval transformation of textual form, where the precarious post-classical fruits of learning were preserved in new modes of encyclopaedism, commentary, and annotation. Beckett's overt display of learning in his early novels was arguably a kind of intellectual and textual preservation. But the contest of ideas in his work subsequently became less one of intellectual history and more that of immanent thinking in the process of composition itself.

Acque divine e liturgie celesti. Tracce di una realtà alchemica fra ellenismo e iranismo

The starting point of the diffusion of the alchemical ideas is the Hellenistic Egypt, the environment in which bloomed the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus, the interpraetatio graeca of Egyptian god Thōt. The Islamic conquest of Egypt in the seventh century A.D. exiled the Greek alchemy to Constantinople, where the alchemical ideas undewent a process of stasis. Alchemy, the «sacred art», is in the ancient world the meeting place of many cultures, a crossroad between Iran and Hellenism. Among the texts of alchemy it is worth mentioning a series of pseudoephigrapha ascribed to several ancient authors; among these there is a prominent pre-Socratic philosopher, Democritus, whom the oldest sources make a disciple of Magi and Chaldaeans. Democritus appears in these writings as a follower of the Persian Mage Ostanes, who in the temple of Memphis initiated him in the mysteries of the ancient writers. In this texts we find the sum of different traditions, the same as those of a Coptic Gnostic treatise found at Nag-Hammadi, the Apocalypse of Adam. A text that describes a revelation of Adam to his son Seth about a coming of a Phōster, the future «Illuminator», who manifests himself and «rises» from the waters.

Plants' Interconnected Lives: From Ovid's Myths to Presocratic Thought and Beyond

Plants' Interconnected Lives: From Ovid's Myths to Presocratic Thought and Beyond

The Power of the Monstrous

Alterity and Otherness have often been the privileged field of contemplation within Western philosophy. Since the Presocratic philosophers, Being has been defined in relation to-and more often opposed to-non-Being, just as Goodness has been considered in relation to Evil, Beauty in relation to the Ugly, Society in relation to Nature, and the examples could be multiplied ad libitum. Every identity is shaped in opposition to an excluded other, an outside, or some thing. Identity and alterity are thus constructed as two inseparable sides of a single, coherent philosophical discourse, or rather a field of various discourses that compose a philosophy, associated with-although not limited to-the early centuries of what we call modernity.Alterity has many faces, depending not only on the different fields of thought in which it is explored (e.g., theology, anthropology, aesthetics, politics, etc.), but also on the nature of its relationship with identity and, more particularly, with the degree of its resistance to or compatibility with identity. No wonder, thus, that so many philosophers have been fascinated not only with alterity in general, but with alterity at the extreme boundaries (geographical as much as ontological) of otherness, at its greatest distance from identity itself. The otherness found at this extreme distance has traditionally been described as monstrous.Monstrosity and the monster have received an astonishing degree of attention across the centuries, not only from philosophers, artists and poets but also, more recently, from scholars in the history of philosophy. The concept of marginality and margins, in particular, has magnetized the attention of the latter and, in the process, completely expanded the comprehension of the centre, or what is considered the centre. Perhaps what has not been underlined enough in the history of philosophy is something best described by an almost paradoxical expression: the centrality of the margin itself. Monstrosity does not simply offer the line or the margin as the site of conflict, difference, or what remains unknown (for example, between the inside and the outside of identity); it entails a reflection upon the role played by alterity and otherness in the grounding or emergence of identity. In other words, it draws our attention to the role played by marginality, and otherness of various kinds, in the definition, conception, and understanding of identity during the early modern period and beyond. In our view, identity itself is inseparable from monstrosity.If the monstrum is what causes the most profound bewilderment and amazement and if, according to Aristotle's dictum about thaumazein in the incipit of his Metaphysics, wonder is the origin of philosophy itself,1 might we recognize in monstrosity and its marginality something more archetypical and central than has traditionally been credited? Perhaps we might find in abnormality, exceptionality, and otherness something that amazes and, more disturbingly, interpellates the entire philosophical enterprise. Thus, the opening of philosophy, that is, the openings of worlds, the genesis of forms of life, are each tied, as if in a web, with the many figures of monstrosity.Given the multifarious complexity of the topic of monstrosity, a plurality of approaches and singular incursions into the thought of individual philosophers or of limited historical periods often provides the best results. This is the rationale and the approach that we have followed for this special issue. We have asked contributors for monographic articles on monstrosity in single authors or articles that compare philosophers' use of monstrosity; we also asked contributors to measure the impact that early modern ideas of monstrosity have had, or continue to have, upon contemporary philosophical and political issues.The question of cultural impact is particularly relevant. Among the philosophical ideas that have had an influence on the world we live in, monstrosity-in the broadest sense of profound alterity and radical otherness-is one of the most powerful. …

The Hippocratic Soul

Pneuma is the origin of soul and mind in the Hippocratic Corpus. As the object of study of the Hippocratic was body and its diseases, it should not be surprising that these physicians defended a physical view of the soul and mind, but interestingly mainly in a physical rather than bodily conception. If the pre-Socratic philosophers agreed to say that the air, or anything associated with it, was the universal principle of soul, the Hippocratic particularly discussed concrete air conditions such as wind, temperature and humidity, which affect the body and mind in their healthy or pathological functioning.

Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator

This is the first book-length study in English of the interpretative and philosophical approach of the commentaries of of Cilicia (c. AD 530). Simplicius' work, marked by doctrinal complexity and scholarship, is unusually self-conscious, learned and rich in its sources, and he is therefore one of those rare authors who is of interest to ancient philosophers, historians and classicists alike. Here, Han Baltussen argues that our understanding of Simplicius' methodology will be greatly enhanced if we study how his scholarly approach impacts on his philosophical exegesis. His commentaries are placed in their intellectual context and several case studies shed light on his critical treatment of earlier philosophers and his often polemical use of previous commentaries. Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius not only clarifies the objectives, pre-suppositions and impact of Simplicius' work, but also illustrates how, as a competent philosopher explicating Aristotelian and Platonic ideas, he continues and develops a method that pursues philosophy by way of exegetical engagement with earlier thinkers and commentators. The investigation opens up connections with broader issues, such as the reception of Presocratic philosophy within the commentary tradition, the nature and purpose of his commentaries, and the demise of pagan philosophy.

Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy. By JohnPalmer. pp. xii, 428, Oxford University Press, 2009, $99.00.

The Heythrop JournalVolume 57, Issue 1 p. 148-149 BOOK REVIEW Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy. By John Palmer. pp. xii, 428, Oxford University Press, 2009, $99.00. Robin Waterfield , Robin Waterfield Lakonia , GreeceSearch for more papers by this author Robin Waterfield , Robin Waterfield Lakonia , GreeceSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 December 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.9_12307Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume57, Issue1January 2016Pages 148-149 RelatedInformation

Aurora Corti, L’Adversus Colotem di Plutarco. Storia di una polemica filosofica

Recent years have seen the publication of a number of significant studies of Plutarch’s Adversus Colotem. The Adv. Col. has always been of interest, of course, as a source for Presocratic philosophers and also the philosophy of the Hellenistic Epicureans, Cyrenaics, and Academics. But in these recent studies it has also been considered as a whole work in its own right, with critics and interpreters becoming increasingly interested not just in looking through Plutarch to access a Hellenistic o...

Heraclitean Ontology for Specifying Systems

Recently, there has been renewed interest in applying (formal) ontologies to develop real-world semantics for conceptual modeling that guides the modeling process. The best-known ontology in this context is the BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) ontology, which provides a classification of concepts to represent the application domain in a specific categorization. BWW has been used to analyze and evaluate UML/SysML constructs and to map them to ontological concepts. This paper examines complex systems that rely on SysML-based modeling for designing and managing projects using model-driven process. It is claimed that such methodology ensures high quality, trustworthiness, cost efficiency, and schedule compliance throughout the life cycle of a project. The problem is that the current dominant paradigm in the model-driven process, motivated by UML and SysML, focuses on a multiplicity of specifications. It is claimed that building a meaningful single model that encompasses the whole system is impossible; thus, series of models are produced that offer various “views” of the system. Nevertheless, the thesis of this paper is that SysML achieves only marginal success as a modeling tool because of its multiplicity and fragmentation of representations, and its failure to furnish a nucleus around which different phases of the development process can evolve. Accordingly, a new ontological foundation is proposed, based on the notion of flow adopted from the teachings of Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. This approach is applied to a sample study case utilized in the SysML-based software development process called CORE (Vitech Corporation) that presents an integrated, model-driven systems engineering environment. The results point to the viability and advantages of the new methodology in comparison with SysML system specification.

Concepciones sobre la reproducción sexual en Filón de Alejandría y sus antecedentes científicos griegos

This work intends to analyze the infl uence of the Greek scientifi c knowledge produced in the fi elds of biological, physiological and medical studies over the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, through an examination of his conceptions about the process of human sexual reproduction and, in particular, about the issue of the participation and role of men and women in gestation. In the fi rst place, we study the different theories about this subject which circulated in the Greek world: the traditional views expressed in tragedy, the theories of the pre-Socratic philosophers, of Hippocratic medicine and of Aristotle. Then, we analyze the ideas expressed by Philo about this matter, we investigate which of the Greek theories exerted greater infl uence over his thought and we try to explain why Philo appropriates some of these theories while discards others.

El debate sobre la esfericidad de la Tierra en época clásica

El debate sobre la esfericidad, cuya solución encontramos reflejada por primera vez en los textos de Aristóteles, ocupó un papel importante en los ambientes intelectuales de los siglos VI y V a.C. Si bien se conserva poco del pensamiento de los llamados filósofos presocráticos, otros autores como historiadores, médicos, comediógrafos y filósofos de finales del siglo V y principios del IV proporcionan una importante información para comprender la realidad de dichos planteamientos.

In the light of science: our ancient quest for knowledge and the measure of modern physics

The birth of science in ancient Greece had a historical impact that is still being felt today. Physicist Demetris Nicolaides examines the epochal shift in thinking that led pre-Socratic philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE to abandon the prevailing mythologies of the age and, for the first time, to analyze the natural world in terms of impersonal, rationally understood principles. He argues not only that their conceptual breakthroughs anticipated much of later science but that scientists of the twenty-first century are still grappling with the fundamental problems raised twenty-five hundred years ago. Looking at the vast sweep of human history, the author delves into the factors that led to the birth of science: urbanization, the role of religion, and in Greece a progressive intellectual curiosity that was unafraid to question tradition. Why did the first scientific approach to understanding the world take place in Greece? The author makes a convincing case that, aside from factors of geography and politics, the power of the Greek language and a cultural proclivity for critical thinking played a large role. In the Light of Science is a unique approach to the history of science revealing the important links between the ancient past and the present scientific endeavor to understand the universe.

Die Überlieferung des Fr. 18 Marcovich Heraklits (= DK 22 B 81) in PHerc. 1004 (Philodemi De rhetorica, Liber vii)

The Heraclitean tradition in the Herculaneum papyri is a topic which involves some of the most important research fields of ancient philosophy: ethics, physics and cosmology, theology and aesthetics (particularly rhetoric). This paper concentrates on Heraclitus’ fr. 18 Marcovich (= DK 22 B 81), where the pre-Socratic philosopher talks about an unspecified κοπίδων ἀρχηγόϲ. The fragment occurs in the seventh book of Philodemus’ Rhetoric (PHerc. 1004) and is the only direct quotation of Heraclitus in this multi-volume treatise. This article presents a new textual reconstruction of the two columns of the papyrus in which the same passage is quoted and attempts: 1. to contextualize the quotation inside the Philodemean paraphrase of a treatise by the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon against the rhetoricians of his time; 2. to reconsider the grammatical and philosophical problem of the subject of the Heraclitean quotation. Almost all scholars have considered Pythagoras to be the target of Heraclitus. But certain elements allow us to go beyond this old opinion and to understand this fragment as something of more than a personal dispute. Rhetoric, according to its supporters, was an ‘art’ since Homer’s times and gained its professional autonomy with Corax and Tisias. There is no reason to believe that, in quoting Heraclitus, Diogenes has totally changed the subject of the fragment he cites. That subject could originally have been very similar to that attested in the Philodemean paraphrase, that is the education of the rhetoricians (ἡ τῶν ῥητόρων εἰϲαγωγή).1

II Being and Truth, Humanity and Reality

In order to understand the meaning and scope of the challenge that the sophists present to us, we must clear the field of all ambiguities and prejudices. All too often the sophist is only taken into consideration as a polemical target, as a counterpart to the philosopher: whereas the philosopher argues in order to seek the truth, the sophist only tries to win an argument; and whereas the philosopher concerns himself with problems in all of their complexity, the sophist instrumentally focuses on fashionable topics that might interest his public of potential pupils (in other words, people willing to pay him). These contrasts are repeated not only in relation to the future, which is to say to Plato and Aristotle, but also, retrospectively, in relation to the so-called ‘Presocratic philosophers’. As a consequence, the sophists find themselves in a sort of no man's land, and their activities appear to mark a break in the history of philosophy, interrupting its toilsome and earnest progression from myth to reason.

Dualités présocratiques

This papers tries to show at first that the dualism Plutarchus attributed in the De Iside et Osiride to most ancient thinkers, mainly «presocratics», has been largely influenced by the doxographical overview given by Aristotle at the beginning of the Metaphysics, which not only assumed that Empedocles was the first to introduce principles of Good and Evil, but also compared the theory of Anaxagoras to the alleged platonic dualism of the One and the Other. If dualities are quite present and important in some of the main theories of the so‑called presocratic philosophers, the question remains to determine in which cases these dualities can be compared to dualism in the sense this word has taken since Hyde. The second part of this article will thus consist to try to answer this question on the ground of three examples of thinkers for whom dualities played a crucial role : Alcmaeon, Parmenides and, chiefly, Empedocles, who had obviously linked Love and Strife to an axiological pattern in his Katharmoi.

FIRE AT NIGHT: A VERSION OF HERAKLEITOS

1 R F I R E A T N I G H T : A V E R S I O N O F H E R A K L E I T O S H . L . H I X Philosophers call it a category mistake when something is treated as if it belonged in a category to which in fact it does not belong. And philosophers consistently make two category mistakes with regard to the influential ancient Greek public intellectual Herakleitos : that he wrote fragments and that he was a pre-Socratic philosopher. First Mistake: Herakleitos Wrote Fragments It is true that nothing of Herakleitos’s work has come down to us in continuous or complete form. We might have only a small handful of Sophocles’ apparently numerous plays, but what plays we do have are complete; what dialogues we have of Plato might be (ironically) copies of copies, but they are complete. Of Herakleitos , though, we have only short citations embedded in various works by later authors. Earlier translations, without exception, preserve (and even emphasize) that fragmentation: of course it would be irresponsible to present what has arrived to us as if it had arrived whole. No self-respecting translator would downplay the 2 H I X Y incompleteness and discontinuity of what we have from Herakleitos . Yet one of the short passages that has reached us warns, ‘‘Let us not thoughtlessly consent to common sense in momentous matters .’’ In this matter at least, the warning is apt: the common sense of things in regard to Herakleitos’s work is mistaken and ought not to be consented to. That the work has reached us in fragments does not mean that Herakleitos wrote fragments. Of the passages we have from Herakleitos, to take their current fragmentation as definitive of their character is to mistake an e√ect of transmission history for a revelation of authorial intention or a disclosure of original textual architecture. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven in their anthology The Presocratic Philosophers fall into this trap, perfectly exemplifying consent to common sense. ‘‘The surviving fragments,’’ they suggest, ‘‘have very much the appearance of oral pronouncements put into a concise and striking, and therefore easily memorable, form; they do not resemble extracts from a continuous written work.’’ Kirk and Raven admit that the one longish passage that appears to have been the opening of Herakleitos ’s treatise on nature (‘‘Logos is ever . . .’’) is ‘‘a structurally complicated sentence’’ that is continuous enough to stand as a counterexample to their view, but they wave it away by speculating that ‘‘possibly when Heraclitus achieved fame as a sage a collection of his most famous utterances was made, for which a special prologue was composed.’’ With a vicious circularity, Kirk and Raven take this speculation as both supportive of and supported by the view – part of the common sense – that ‘‘the fragments we possess’’ (as if the ‘‘Logos is ever . . .’’ passage were not one of them) are ‘‘obviously framed as oral apothegms rather than as parts of a discursive treatise’’ (emphasis mine). Parity of reasoning would sanction a view that the Roman Colosseum, because it is now in ruins, must have been originally designed and built as a ruin, must in its nature be a ruin, and that the large intact portion, so unlike the rest, was a later addition. Even translators alert to the dubiousness of taking current fragmentation as a fulfillment of original form still replicate that gesture. Charles H. Kahn, for example, in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, wisely disputes Hermann Diels’s curious decision to F I R E A T N I G H T 3 R list the surviving passages ‘‘in alphabetical order according to the name of the author citing them,’’ and replaces Diels’s alphabetical ordering with a thematic ordering on the premise that ‘‘Heraclitus ’ discourse as a whole was as carefully and artistically composed as are the preserved parts, and that the formal ordering of the whole was as much an element in its total meaning as in the case of any lyric poem from the same period.’’ Yet that imputation of wholeness notwithstanding, Kahn’s book bears...

Supplemento papirologico alle recenti edizioni dei Milesii. Praesocratica Herculanensia VIII

AbstractThis paper provides a complete collection of the papyrological sources concerning the Milesians. Apart from some texts which do not appear in the Corpus dei Papiri Filosofici Greci e Latini (CPF), this collection also takes into account some Herculanean testimonia to Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes which have been forgotten in both the old and most recent editions of these pre-Socratic philosophers. An appendix deals with the alleged references to the Milesians in Book 11 of Epicurus’ On Nature.

VI The Gods and Religion

The theme of the gods, of their existence, appearance, and interest in human affairs, was an object of constant attention for the Greeks from the most ancient times. As is widely known, Greek religion presents some highly original features compared with present-day religions: there are no religious texts establishing a body of orthodox doctrines, and no figures to whom worship is officially entrusted. Perhaps precisely because of this fluid situation, the element of the divine marks almost all salient moments in the lives of individuals and cities. This constant presence in itself explains why, from Homer onwards, all writers were so keen to explore the issue of the gods. In particular, many Presocratic philosophers staunchly criticized popular prejudices (often presenting the gods as thieves, adulterers, and seducers) by suggesting alternative and more rigorous conceptions. In doing so, the Presocratics changed the content of the divine, without denying its existence: they opposed the theology of the philosophers to the theology of the poets. The sophists also fit within this broader movement towards the critical redefinition of traditional religiosity, a movement which engaged many leading personalities of the age: let us think of Euripides, of Thucydides’ analysis of the plague, or of the debate on the ‘sacred disease’ (epilepsy) among Hippocratic doctors. In particular, the sophists stand out on account of what we might term their ‘sociological’ perspective: while criticizing the phenomenon of religion, they acknowledged its importance in human life; searching for its causes, they embarked on enquiries into the nature of the gods, the origin of the belief in their existence, their role in people's lives, and myths as a means to convey traditional values.

Foi, é e será? Usos da fórmula da eternidade para falar do tempo na filosofia pré-socrática

The so called Eternity Formula is found both in Homer and Hesiod. The speeches of a seer and of the muses are said to inform the things “that are, will be and were”. Versions of this formula were also used by presocratic philosophers to describe the temporal aspect of central concepts within their cosmologies. Generally, they use it to convey the eternity of an entity by the affirmation of its existence throughout past, present and future. That is the case of fire in Heraclitus’ linear and reciprocal conception of time, of hate and love in the cyclical time of Empedocles, of the intelligence living in an eternal now in Anaxagoras’ cosmos, and of the eternal being in Melissus and Parmenides. Nonetheless, each use of the formula has its own peculiarities. The aim of this article is to make a comparative analysis of them, both within the thought of each philosopher as in face of one another. At the end I will propose a general formula of eternity in the presocratic philosophy that points towards an absolute conception of time. Furthermore, I hope to show that such an absolute treatment of time ends up by denying it implicitly or explicitly in a particular type of eternal present.