The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists (Oxford World's Classics)

Thales, Anaximander, Parmenides, Zeno, Pythagoras, the Sophists… these names may ring a bell: it all are early Greek philosophers, active roughly between 600 and 400 BCE. But what do they actually represent? This book offers a solid overview, with both detailed introductions and an (exhaustive) anthology of their surviving texts. Robin Waterfield is critical and cautious, but because of the fragmentary and sometimes downright obscure nature of the fragments, a certain degree of speculative interpretation is almost inevitable. Therefore, this is not exactly bedtime reading. More about the fundamental uncertainties of Presocratic work in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2703893124.

An important book, if not for the conclusions, then for the questions asked. Here are the "Big Questions" in ancient form.

This volume contains translations of all the most important fragments of the Presocratics and Sophists, and of the most informative testimonia from ancients sources, supplemented by lucid commentary.

PRIMEROS FILOSOFOS

Robin Waterfield (1952) impartió la enseñanza en varias universidades inglesas. Ha traducido gran parte de los diálogos de Platón, de las tragedias de Eurípides, las Vidas paralelas de Plutarco y la Historia de Heródoto, entre otras obras clásicas del griego, y ha escrito una historia de Atenas y estudios sobre Platón y Sócrates.

Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and the first Western philosophers developed theories of the world which express simultaneously their sense of wonder and their intuition that the world should be comprehensible. But their enterprise was by no means limited to this proto-scientific task. Through, for instance, Heraclitus' enigmatic sayings, the poetry of Parmenides and show more Empedocles, and Zeno's paradoxes, the Western world was introduced to metaphysics, rationalist theology, ethics, and logic, by thinkers who often seem to be mystics or shamans as much as philosophers or scientists in the modern mould. And out of the Sophists' reflections on human beings and their... show less