Greek Thought
A Guide to Classical Knowledge
Edited by Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd; Translated by Catherine Porter, 2000
Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In more than sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought — investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought about what they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the conditions and possibilities of knowing. Calling attention to the characteristic reflexivity of Greek thought, the analysis in this book reminds us of what our own reflections owe to theirs.
In sections devoted to philosophy, politics, the pursuit of knowledge, major thinkers, and schools of thought, this work shows us the Greeks looking at themselves, establishing the terms for understanding life, language, production, and action. The authors evoke not history, but the stories the Greeks told themselves about history; not their poetry, but their poetics; not their speeches, but their rhetoric. Essays that survey political, scientific, and philosophical ideas, such as those on Utopia and the Critique of Politics, Observation and Research, and Ethics; others on specific fields from Astronomy and History to Mathematics and Medicine; new perspectives on major figures, from Anaxagoras to Zeno of Elea; studies of core traditions from the Milesians to the various versions of Platonism: together these offer a sense of the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that marked Greek civilization—and that Aristotle considered a natural and universal trait of humankind. With thirty-two pages of color illustrations, this work conveys the splendor and vitality of the Greek intellectual adventure.
(Text by the editors)
Contents:
Translators’ Note
Introduction: On Home Ground in a Distant Land
Maps
Philosophy
The Philosopher
Images of the World
Myth and Knowledge
The Question of Being
Epistemology
Ethics
Politics
The Statesman As Political Actor
Inventing Politics
Utopia and the Critique of Politics
The Sage and Politics
The Pursuit of Knowledge
Schools and Sites of Learning
Observation and Research
Demonstration and the Idea of Science
Astronomy
Cosmology
Geography
Harmonics
History
Language
Logic
Mathematics
Medicine
Physics
Poetics
Rhetoric
Technology
Theology and Divination
Theories of Religion
Major Figures
Anaxagoras
Antisthenes
Archimedes
Aristotle
Democritus
Epicurus
Euclid
Galen
Heraclitus
Herodotus
Hippocrates
Parmenides
Plato
Plotinus
Plutarch
Polybius
Protagoras
Ptolemy
Pyrrhon
Socrates
Thucydides
Xenophon
Zeno
Currents of Thought
The Academy
Aristotelianism
Cynicism
Hellenism and Christianity
Hellenism and Judaism
The Milesians
Platonism
Pythagoreanism
Skepticism
Sophists
Stoicism
Chronology
Contributors
Illustration Sources
Index