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

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-520-41332-0
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 78, 252 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 390 g

Reihe: Sather Classical Lectures

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wohl, Victoria

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Antike Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Erkenntnistheorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Metaphysik, Ontologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

Preface: (Meta)Physics for Poets

Introduction: The Poetry of Being

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

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

3. Empedocles's Autobiography
Autobiography of a Daimon
Autos
Bios
Graphe

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

Über Autor(innen)

Victoria Wohl is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and author of Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens, Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory, and Euripides and the Politics of Form.