James Warren (1)

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are rightly recognized as beacons of ancient Greek philosophy, whose ground-breaking treatises on ethics, politics, and the natural order dominated the Mediterranean for more than a millennium after their deaths. Less well known are the individual sparks who lit the flame these three would fan into a world-changing inferno. The fragments that remain of the Presocratics, the Greek philosophers who thought and spoke and wrote "before Socrates," offer a fractured show more but tantalizing window into some of the earliest demythologized and rationalistic answers to the questions we still ask today: what is existence, where is it going, and what does it all mean?

I cannot recommend this book highly enough as a brief, one-volume, accessible introduction to the Presocratics. I wouldn't have believed anyone could distill oceans of technical academia into a single drinkable cup, but Warren has somehow pulled off the impossible. Every major interpretative debate and difficulty is here, but woven so subtly into the narrative that the careful reader gains a well-rounded understanding of Presocratic thinking without getting lost in thickets of dry, technical monographs and textbooks. That's not to say that none of the content is challenging, but it is to say you won't find a better popular-level introduction to a universe made entirely of fire, hair that contains gold that contains flesh, and random assemblages of eyeballs and limbs concocted in the eternal struggle between Love and Strife. Welcome to the world of the Presocratics. show less

A helpful introduction to the Greek philosophers known as the "Presocratics," mostly before the time of Socrates, focused primarily on matters of natural philosophy.

The author does well at showing what can be known from the fragments preserved from the Presocratics: Thales, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno and Melissus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus and Leucippus, Philolaus, and Diogenes of Apollonia. He describes what can be known of their philosophies and the show more questions with which they grappled.

Even though the material can sometimes be challenging, the author does well at explaining the issues in a way most people will be able to understand. One is struck at how the issues discussed within philosophy from the beginning, in many ways, continue to the present day; the same basic issues about our reality and how we perceive that reality are discussed by later Greek philosophers and such discussions continue until now.

Therefore, the book is quite useful and relevant for the modern day reader. Worth consideration. show less