The Pre Platonic Philosophers

Roughly formulating many of the themes he later developed at length, Nietzsche sketches concepts such as the will to power, eternal recurrence, and self-overcoming and links them to specific pre-Platonics." "This translation, complete with Nietzsche's own extensive sidenotes and philological citations, is accompanied by a prologue, introductory essay, and extensive translator's commentary.".

"Whitlock's translation definitively confirms that Nietzsche grouped Socrates with the earlier Greeks, rather than with Plato and other "mixed character philosophers" as many interpreters have claimed. That Nietzsche's philosophical sympathies lay with the pre-Platonics, as opposed to the pre-Socratics, bears substantially on his later rejection of absolutes such as Truth, Knowledge, Beauty, and Being." "The Pre-Platonic Philosophers is invaluable both as a record of Nietzsche's views on the early Greek thinkers and as a prefigurement of key aspects of his mature philosophy."--BOOK JACKET.

This book is a complete translation of the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers given in the fifth edition of Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.

A lively and thematic treatment of early Greek philosophy, this work discusses the invention of western philosophy - the first thinkers to explore ideas about the nature of reality, time, and the origin of the universe.

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.

This two-part volume collects the complete fragments and most important testimonies for the leading presocratic philosophers. The Greek and Latin texts are translated on facing pages and accompanied by a brief commentary for each philosopher.

Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy. To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live? Plato’s dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions—about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress—Zuckert’s brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present.

Dale Wilkerson's book shows how, like many of his contemporaries, Nietzsche looked to the Greeks in an attempt to alleviate Europe's woes. His work in this area resembles that of the cultural anthropologist who uncovers formal differences in social manners that might explain the development of humankind's most important instincts-those for carving out personal identity and for forging social unity. Nietzsche and the Greeks is a much needed guide to this fascinating subject matter.