Mark I. Vuletic

Last updated 21 November 2008

Introduction

When one thinks of ancient Greek philosophy, one is likely immediately to think of Socrates. So famous is Socrates that even Bill and Ted recognized him during their most excellent time-traveling adventure. The birth of philosophy took place a little over a century-and-a-half before Socrates was born, but the appearance of Socrates was so great a watershed that, unfairly or not,  we refer to all of the philosophers who were born before him (even the ones who ended up outliving him) as Presocratic philosophers.

Studying Presocratic philosophy is important, but it can also be a real trial. One must, for instance, learn the difference between Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Anaxagoras: even the names are enough to make one tear out one's hair with grief and horror (or, for those who are bald, to score deep marks into the top of one's head with one's fingernails). More importantly, when we try to figure out what the Presocratics thought, we have very little evidence to go on. None of the Presocratic philosophers left any writings that have survived up to the present day (even though many of them had a prodigious output), so historians of Presocratic philosophy have to look at later (sometimes much later) writers who either attribute views to the Presocratics, or purport to quote from them. Even with these secondary sources, the evidence is often scanty and of uncertain reliability. We're not going to get too deep into these matters; let mere awareness of it suffice. I will present to you the most conventional interpretations, and sometimes some alternate interpretations that interest me, and this is the spirit in which you should take the following discussions. Where you see categorical terms, take it with a grain of salt.

If you want to take a look at what fragmentary evidence we have to work with when it comes to the Presocratics, a good and inexpensive place to start is with Early Greek Philosophy, by Jonathan Barnes. If you want to be comprehensive, see the fragments in their original Greek (and, where relevant, Latin) and can speak German, then you need to go for the gold standard: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, by Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (of which there is a translation by Kathleen Freeman).

The philosophers

What follows is a list of the chief Presocratic philosophers, in very rough chronological order, but lumped together into (sometimes loose) collections. I will hyperlink this list to articles on the specific individuals or collections as I write them.

1. The Milesians: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.

2. Pythagoras.

3. Xenophanes.

4. The Eleatics: Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno (of Elea).

5. Heraclitus.

6. Anaxagoras.

7. Empedocles.

8. The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus

9. The Sophists: Protagoras, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and many, many others.

Resources

I have mentioned Jonathan Barnes's Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin, 2002), which  collects translations of many of the original fragments which scholars have to deal with to try to extract the thoughts of the Presocratics.

I found James Warren's Presocratics (University of California Press, 2007) immensely readable and enjoyable.

Catherine Osborne's Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004) struck me as contrarian, but pleasantly and convincingly so. In any case, it's as readable as anything you will be able to get your hands on.