The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy (eBook)

Victoria Wohl (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
252 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-41333-7 (ISBN)

Infos

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus.
 
Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity.
 

Inhalt

Contents

Preface: (Meta)Physics for Poets

Introduction: The Poetry of Being

1. Parmenides's Logos of Being
Metaphor and Metaphysics
The Hodos Poluphēmos
Bounds of Bonds
Like a Well-Rounded Sphere

2. Time, the Cosmos, and the Soul in Heraclitus
Heraclitus's Psychocosmology
Aei and Aiōn
Aphorism Lullaby
Stutter, Syncopation

3. Empedocles's Autobiography
Autobiography of a Daimōn
Autos
Bios
Graphē

4. Paratactic Politics: Anaxagoras and the Things
Political Cosmology
A Community of Things
Nous Autokrates
Vision of the Obscure

5. Democritus and the Poetics of (N)othing
Ontology's Secret Stowaway
Atoms, Void, and the Indifferent Physics of the Den
Know Thyself and Nothing in Excess
Signifying Nothing

Conclusion: The Prose of the World

Bibliography
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.8.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Sather Classical Lectures
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie Altertum / Antike
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Anaxagoras theory • ancient epistemology • Ancient Greek Thought • Democritus atomism • early metaphysics • Empedocles cosmology • Heraclitus fragments • literary philosophy • Parmenides logic • Philosophical Poetry • Philosophy and Language • poetic reasoning • Presocratic philosophy
• ISBN-10: 0-520-41333-4 / 0520413334
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-41333-7 / 9780520413337