Lebedev_Placing the Ionian tradition of PERI PHYSEOS HISTORIA in context: the role of seafaring, navigation and Milesian colonization in the birth of Greek science.pdf (original) (raw)
Related papers
The origins of Greek thought. Review of M. Sassi, 'Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece'
Aristeas. Philologia classica et historia antiqua, 2021
This is a full text of the review of M. Sassi's monograph 'The beginnings of philosophy in Greece' (2018), a very brief exposition of which has been published previously in Classical Review. While passing a generally favorable verdict on the value of Sassi''s contribution to the study of this much-debated topic, the author also criticizes somewhat excessive 'pluralism' of 'beginnings' admitted by Sassi, by emphasizing the fundamental and leading role of the two main 'beginnings', represented by the Ionian Peri physeos historia, a detached scientific study of nature (physis), on the one hand, and the Italian (Pythagorean and Eleatic) 'search for wisdom' (philosophy as a way of life), primarily centered on psyche and setting life-building and educational goals. By engaging in a dialogue with Sassi, the author takes opportunity to expose his own views on the origin of Greek philosophy and science that disagree with much of what one can read in modern histories of ancient philosophy about Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoreans, Alcmaeon and other Pre-Platonic thinkers. This disagreement results not so much from the invention of new interpretations, as from the rejection of the 19th - 20th centuries hypercritical approach to the sources of Preplatonic philosophy, as well as from the rejection of the false category of 'Presocrastics' together with the ill-founded doxographical theory of Diels, and a return to the ancient tradition combined with respect to the opinion of the ancient readers of the lost Preplatonic works: the study of 'hermeneutical isoglosses' and reliance on the consensus of independent ancient readers who possessed the complete texts of the lost Pre-Platonic works. Thesaurus Linguae Graecae provides a powerful tool for this research, unknown to previous generations of scholars.
The Great Russian Encyclopaedia, 2007
A very brief and unorthodox history of Greek philosophy tries to demonstrate how the elimination of some persistent false stereotypes in the historiography of ancient philosophy will result in a different picture and in a different narrative about what happened in Archaic and Classical periods in Greek thought. The stereotypes that we eliminate in this sketch are the following: 1) The pseudo-historical and misleading concept of ‘Presocratics’. 2) Plato-centrism: the enormous exaggeration of the originality of Plato's basic doctrines and the denial of their archaic Pythagorean and Eleatic roots of Platonism. 3) Pseudo-historical evolutionism: focusing on (often imaginary) historical change and ‘development’ and neglect for persistent paradigms and stable forms of ancient thought; neglect for typological considerations which are based on conceptual schemes, and not on words. 4) Underestimation of the Scientific revolution in 6th century Miletus and the wrong denial by Popper and his followers of its empirical non-speculative method (inferential proofs from available evidence tekmeria, tekmairesthai). 5) Pseudo-historical denial (starting with Burnet 1892) of the existence of metaphysical idealism in Preplatonic Greek philosophy which is incomparably more archaic than the revolutionary new Milesian naturalism. Contrary to the deceptive evolutionist story of ‘discovery’ of the first principles in Aristotle’s Alpha book of Metaphysics, the Milesians should not be presented as primitive thinkers who ‘who have not yet’ discovered the moving cause (i.e. god distinct from matter), they rather should be presented as more advanced thinkers who ‘have already dismissed’ the moving cause together with archaic creationism and replaced the anthropomorphic gods of mythopoetic cosmogonies with a revolutionary concept of self-evolving ‘nature’ (physis) unknown before them. Greek philosophy and science had two ‘beginnings’ in the 6 century B.C. initiated by two intellectual giants: Anaximander in the East (the father of naturalistic monism), and Pythagoras in the West, the father of speculative idealist metaphysics. For the next 1000 years or so the two mainstream traditions of Greek thought were engaged in incessant ‘gigantomachia over being’ described in Plato’s Sophist. In the second half of the 5th century the naturalistic Ionian and the mentalist Italian traditions were joined by the new Attic dialectical tradition, that served both camps (Socrates versus Sophists).
The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece
The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece , 2018
How can we face today the problem of the beginnings of philosophy, avoiding the rationalistic opposition between mythos and logos and exploring instead the multiple styles of thought (hence the plural: beginnings) which emerged on the confine between mythology and the dawning reason? Maria Michela Sassi reconstructs the texture of archaic knowledge through its vanishing points, its accelerations in time, its cognitive techniques (starting from writing), the habit of intellectual competition. All these things made possible what we were used to call «the Greek miracle». Such definition, however, is misleading in its very conveying a charm that alters the features of what really happened in that far past between the Asian shores of Ionia and Magna Graecia. The beginning of the long process leading to the birth of philosophy was characterized by geographic polycentrism and disciplinary polygenesis: from Miletus to Elea, from Ephesus to Agrigento, some people started to reflect on the cosmic order, elaborated doctrines on the soul, wrote in the solemn Homeric metre or, later on, abandoned prosody in favour of an assertive prose, articulated like the laws of the polis. In order to define the category of the «Pre-Socratics», the prefix – however fortunate it has been – is not enough. The Milesian natural thinkers, the rhapsodist Xenophanes, the mathematician and “shaman” Pythagoras, the oracle-like Heraclitus, the inspired Parmenides, the “demonologist” Empedocles: all these thinkers share the same tension towards a reason which, by questioning traditionally recognized viewpoints, revolutionized the panorama of Greek knowledge.