Unit 1 Philosophy Essay

The purpose of this assignment is to discuss the ethical and political implications of philosophical inquiry. The student will compare the events occurred in the Socratic dialogue The Apology and relate these events to current events.

Write at least 500 words to describe your reaction to the events in the dialogue by Plato The Apology. Make sure you address the following questions: Here Socrates is charged of impiety. In your view, do you agree with the Jury’s decision? Is Socrates guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens with his anti-democratic message? Is philosophy a dangerous discipline? Why does Socrates refuse to pay a fine and accept the death penalty? Does this indicate that Socrates is crazy or a man of immense integrity?

PHIL 1100
Unit 1 Lecture: Philosophy, Pre-Socratics, and Socrates

>

>

Introduction

In this lecture, students will learn the origin of philosophy, the “Socratic turn” of philosophy, and the value of
philosophy. The main sources are the Presocratic philosophers, Plato’s Apology, and Bertrand Russell’s “The
Value of Philosophy.”

What is Philosophy?

Consider “ornithology” for example: a branch of zoology dealing with birds. That’s clear.

What about the term “biology”? It is defined as a branch of knowledge that deals with living organisms and vital
processes. But the definition of philosophy is not so straightforward.

Philosophy: literally means love of wisdom. It is a compound word of two words: philos (love) and sophia
(wisdom). To be a philosopher, then, is to love wisdom. Good! We’re getting somewhere. But what is wisdom?

I think a fair definition is that philosophy is the study of the most important questions in life, questions about
morality, religion, reality, language, etc. Thus, philosophy is the academic subject dealing with questions of
metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and logic.

Thus here is a sketch of the 5 main branches:

1. Metaphysics is the study of the fundamental nature of reality and existence.
2. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It is concerned with the origin, acquisition, and nature of

knowledge.
3. Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste.
4. Ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned about morality.
5. Logic is the study of the principles of good reasoning.

PHIL 1100 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/jg9B8bF3nJf7kW/less…

1 of 7 7/6/20, 11:39 AM

Presocratics

The Presocratic philosophers were men who lived in and around Greece during the fifth and sixth centuries
B.C.E. They were the founders of Western philosophy, a new way of thinking about the world that broke away
from mythological thought. In the mythological manner of understanding the world, the behavior of everything in
nature was understood as having the personal choice of some god behind it, and was thus seen to be as
unpredictable as the behavior of humans. There was no distinction between nature and persons.

The Presocratics invented the idea of nature as a natural place, as a collection of objects. These objects operated
according to a predictable pattern that could be discovered by human investigation. In this way they set the stage
for an understanding of the world that is one of the central defining features of Western culture. We now call this
way of understanding science; but it was once called philosophy.

Thales

Thales of Miletus (624-546 B.C.E) is usually credited with being the first philosopher in the West. Thales’ solution
to the problem of the nature of reality will sound strange to your ears, but a closer inspection leaves it actually
quite revealing. He said that everything is water.

Physical things take the form of either a solid, or a liquid, or a gas. Since water can assume all of these forms it is
possible that everything is a form of water. Water is also essential for life. In fact, it appears to be the most
abundant thing in existence, especially if you live on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, as Thales did, and
believe that the Earth itself floated on a giant body of water.

Anaximander

Anaximander, a student of Thales, describes his idea of the one basic reality: “The Unlimited.”

There are two basic ideas of Anaximander that are especially important for us. The Unlimited may mean
something like we mean when we call God “infinite”, and mean by this that God is outside of time and space. The
Unlimited is not itself a particular kind of thing, such as water. Any particular kind of thing is limited to being a
thing of that kind. The Unlimited, however, being of no particular kind, has no limits of this sort. Anaximander’s
apparently unintelligible concept of the “Unlimited” rings true to our contemporary ear if we simply define it as
“energy”.

PHIL 1100 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/jg9B8bF3nJf7kW/less…

2 of 7 7/6/20, 11:39 AM

Anaximenes

He dismissed the theory of Anaximander, and identified the one underlying substance of the cosmos with air. Air
is all around us. It is necessary for life to breathe it. It fills the sky, and upon it floats the earth.

Pure air is the most rarefied substance, but it can condense into heavier and heavier forms. These may be
graded, according to their degree of condensation—as fire, and then wind, and then clouds, and then water, and
then earth.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras (572-497 BCE) believed that the soul existed before this life and will be reborn again after the death
of the human body. The soul was not considered to be a separate thing, but

was thought of as a sort of harmony of the body. If the soul is a type of harmony of the body, then the study of the
harmonies of music and mathematics were seen as a way to nourish the soul. Mathematics and music were also
considered to be the keys to unlocking the secrets of reality. This is because, for the Pythagorians, reality is
number.

Heraclitus and Becoming

Heraclitus (540- 480 BCE) said everything was constantly changing; nothing was permanent.

Heraclitus believes that there is nothing permanent. This is evident in his now famous quoted remark that: “You
cannot step into the same river twice.” Once again, a closer look shows that under an apparent absurdity lay the
seeds of wisdom. For Heraclitus, constant change is a property of appearances, not of reality. Underlying this
changing world of appearances is an order at work. We understand and detect the world through our senses. But
by no means are our senses faculties that accurately represent reality to us. Heraclitus’ theory explains away the
world’s apparent opposites, the path up the mountain is also the path down; a glass half full is a glass half empty;
people have disparate opinions on just about everything.

PHIL 1100 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/jg9B8bF3nJf7kW/less…

3 of 7 7/6/20, 11:39 AM

Parmenides and Being

Parmenides (515-445 BCE) said nothing changes, that everything is permanent, that everything is what he called
Being. How could he hold such a view? There are all sorts of changes constantly occurring in the world around
us. For example, things change their location (motion), or change from one sort of thing to another (wood
becomes heat and ashes when burned), or change a property (a banana changes color from green to yellow).

Parmenides drew the distinction between appearances (“mere seeming”) and reality. On the one hand, there are
the senses that deliver to us our perceptions of the world, perceptions that produce mere opinion. Opinion is
belief based merely on appearances. On the other hand, we have our minds, or reason, that delivers reality to us.
It is through reason and reason alone, that the Way of Truth is to be traveled by Parmenides.

Things either are (Being) or are not (Nothing). There is no category for becoming. Of these two there is only one
category of reality—Being, which is anything that can be thought about. Not-being, which cannot be thought
about, simply is not and should not be mentioned, since it is merely an illusion of the senses. From these two
intuitions: (1) Being is, and (2) not-being is not, Parmenides then proceeds to deduce some rather startling
conclusions.

Democritus and Atomism

Democritus (460-360 BCE) is usually classified as a Presocratic philosopher, but he was actually a contemporary
of Socrates. Following his teacher, Leucippus, he agreed with Parmenides that there is an ultimate reality that is
not visible to the senses, and also agreed that it possessed the properties of being eternal, indestructible, and
indivisible. This ultimate reality he called atoms, and his very modern sounding view is called atomism. According
to the theory of Democritus the world is made of tiny substances infinite in number. These tiny objects exist in the
void, the nothing and the infinite. Atoms have all sorts of forms, shapes, and different sizes. They are elements
combining to produce objects. His reasoning: if you take an object, you can cut it many times. How many? Can
you keep cutting forever? That is impossible. At one point you must arrive at the smallest part, the atom.

PHIL 1100 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/jg9B8bF3nJf7kW/less…

4 of 7 7/6/20, 11:39 AM

Bertrand Russell “The Value of Philosophy”

Bertrand Russell, (1872-1970) British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political
activist, and Nobel laureate.

What is the value of philosophy? Russell considers this question in view of those individuals (practical men) who,
under the influence of science or practical affairs, doubt that philosophy is a valuable discipline. This view is due
to the wrong conception of the ends of life and wrong conception of the goods of philosophy. Science is useful for
inventions and effect on mankind. Utility does not belong to philosophy. The value of philosophy is indirect. This is
the view of the practical man, one who recognizes only the material needs and values and only food for the body
and not the mind.

Even if most people were well off in the world, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable
society. Philosophy aims at knowledge that unifies the sciences. Philosophy has not had success in its attempts
to provide definitive answers. Ask a historian, mineralogist, mathematician what they do—they won’t hesitate. Ask
a philosopher, “What is the point of philosophy?” He will have to confess his study did not achieve positive results.
But philosophy gives birth to sciences. The uncertainty of philosophy is a virtue rather than a vice. Uncertainty
makes you ask questions. Also, it makes you start from acknowledging that we don’t know. Many philosophers
claim to establish truth of answer to certain questions: for example, religion. Those are dogmatic thinkers. We
should not be dogmatic.

Finally, according to Russell, one of the most important aspects of philosophy is that thinking philosophically
enables us to overcome the prejudice of color, race, gender, etc. Philosophy makes the mind impartial and
enlarges the self and soul.

PHIL 1100 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/jg9B8bF3nJf7kW/less…

5 of 7 7/6/20, 11:39 AM

Plato’s Apology

The Defense of Socrates

Socrates begins his legal defense by telling the jury that his enemies poisoned their minds, when the jurors ware
young and impressionable. Aristophanes made Socrates seem as a charlatan-philosopher in the comedy play
The Clouds (423 BC). About corrupting the youth, Socrates argues that deliberate corruption is an illogical action.
That the false accusations of his being a corrupter of youth began at the time of his obedience to the Oracle at
Delphi, and tells how Chaerephon went to the Oracle, to ask if there was a man wiser than Socrates. That when
Chaerephon reported to him that the Oracle said there is no wiser man, he (Socrates) interpreted that divine
report as a riddle — because he was aware of possessing no wisdom “great or small”, and that lying is not in the
nature of the gods.

Socrates tried to solve the riddle by systematically interrogating the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen.
Socrates determined that they were not wise at all. In searching for a man wiser than himself, his questioning
earned him the dubious reputation of social gadfly to the city of Athens.

The jurors of the trial voted the guilt of Socrates by a narrow margin. Socrates antagonizes the court by
proposing, rather than a penalty, a reward. However, the judgment of the court was death for Socrates; Socrates
responds to the death-penalty verdict by saying that death is either total annihilation or eternal life, neither of
which is a real punishment.

PHIL 1100 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/jg9B8bF3nJf7kW/less…

6 of 7 7/6/20, 11:39 AM

References

Curd, Patricia, “Presocratic Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward
N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Plato, (Author), Cooper M. J. (Ed.), Grube, G. M. A. (Tr.). (2002). The Apology in Plato: Five Dialogues:
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo. Hackett Classics, Second Edition.

Russell, B. (1997). “The Value of Philosophy” in The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press.

(CSLO 1, CSLO 2, CSLO 4, CSLO 7, CSLO 8, CSLO 9)

PHIL 1100 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/jg9B8bF3nJf7kW/less…

7 of 7 7/6/20, 11:39 AM

PA2000
Unit 1 Lecture: The Ecology of the Administrative Craft

Unit 1 is an introduction into the course that provides a definition of the field of public administration.an easy
definition of public administration if you are content with government in action – the management of public affairs
or the implementation of public policies. There are several definitions that could be taken into consideration in
different context:

Political – the political nature of public administration makes it different from private or business administration.
Public administration is what government does ranging from scheduling state dinners for visiting officials,
inspecting beef at a slaughterhouse and/or determining the number of rodent hair safe and legal in food we eat.

Public administration is both direct and indirect. It is direct when government employees provide services to the
public as varied as mortgage insurance, and mail delivery. It is indirect when government pays private contractors
to provide goods and services to citizens. An example, NASA operates the space shuttle, but the shuttle itself
was built by private corporations.

Public administration is a phase in the public policymaking phase. Governments are always considering what to
do or not to do. Whatever they do is public policy. All such decisions are made by those who control the political
power and implemented by the administrative officers of the bureaucracy. Public administration is implementing
the public interest. Public interest is the universal label in which political actors wrap the policies and programs
that they advocate.

Public administration is doing collectively that which cannot be so well done individually. What started as
voluntary services became institutionalized as people indicated a preference to pay taxes so that once voluntary
activities could become government function.

Public administration is law in action. The law that creates an agency or program is known as enabling legislation
– the law that legally enables a program to exist. No government administrator can do anything if it is not provided
for in the legislation or in the rules and regulations that the legislation allows the agency to promulgate.

Public Administration is the executive function in government. A president, governor or mayor is constantly
recommending new programs to the Congress, state legislature or city council. They actively compete to
influence the enactment of programs they are anxious to implement.

Public administration is art, not science – or vice versa. Some people have a gift for administration. They have a
knack for getting people to work together harmoniously. The administrative art comprises judgement and common
sense. But the artist is useless without tools – without technical skills (the science) that allows for the digestion
and transference of information. Nothing is more pointless than to argue whether the practice of public
administration is more art or science. It is inherently both. Of course, the more science you have, the better artist
you’ll be. But book learning won’t make you an artist if you don’t possess an element of the gift in the first place.

Public administration is an occupational category. It is whatever the public employees of the world do. It ranges
from brain surgery to street sweeping. Most of the people in the broad occupational category do not even think of
themselves as public administrators. They identify with their specific professions (physicians, engineers, or
teacher) and trades (carpenter, electrician, or plumber). While it is true that they may not be administrators in the
sense of being managers, they are nevertheless, whether they realize it or not, ministering (in the sense of
providing services) to the public.

Public administration is idealism in action. Many people enter public service careers because they are idealist;
they believe in and seek to advance noble principles. “Noble” is the key word here because traditionally the
nobility had public service obligations. They were the warrior class, so it was their obligation to heroically protect
the weak and less fortunate, to accept the notion of nobles oblige. Idealism draws people into public

PA2000 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/2qWMPx1lVsHu0X/le…

1 of 2 7/7/20, 10:12 AM

administration because it provides them with worthwhile and exciting things to do with their lives.

Public administration is an academic field. It is the study of the art and science of management applied to the
public sector. But it traditionally goes beyond the concerns of management and incorporates as its subject matter
all of the political, social, cultural and legal environments that affect the running of public institutions.

The study of public administration must include it ecology. “Ecology” state the Webster Dictionary, “is the mutual
relations, collectively, between organisms and their environment”. An ecological approach to public administration
builds from the ground up; from the elements of a place – soil, climate, location, for example – to the people who
live there – their numbers, and ages and knowledge, and the ways of physical and social technology by which
from the place and in relationship with one another, they get their living.

John Gaus has put together a list of factors that are useful in explaining the ebbs and flow of the function of
government. They are: people, place, physical technology, social technology, wishes and ideas, catastrophe, and
personality. By illustrating concretely the relations of these environmental factors, a cooperative testing of the
theory will e facilitated. The change in the distribution of the people of a governmental unit by time, age and
administration. At our first census, we were a people 80% of whom lived on farms; at our last census one hundred
and fifty years later, 80% of us did not live on farms.

The movement of people (by characteristic age and income group) from the mother city to suburbs, produces its
repercussions in the values of land and buildings, in the tax basis for public services already existent in older
areas and demanded in the new.

Changes in physical technology – the adoption of the automobile – and the role it has come to play. Its wide
spread use was made possible by the development of paved highways provided necessarily as a public service.

The originator of ideas and of social as well as physical inventions are persons. We students of public
administration will do well to study the elements in the influences. Relevant preparation, longevity, personal or
institutional resources for research, sympathetic disciples, frequently some catastrophic situation in which
prevailing attitudes were sufficiently blasted to permit the new ideas to be applied, channels of publication and of
communication generally, as well as inner qualities of industry and integrity all, or nearly all in some combination
will be found.

Catastrophe, especially when leadership and knowledge are prepared with long-time programs into which the
immediate hurried relief action can be fitted, has its place in the ecology of administration

The quality of government’s work depends on the quality of the individual recruited and retained in the public
service, on their respect for bureaucratic accountability and ethical behavior, and especially on their commitment
to the constitutional, democratic system. In stilling such values is a societal task; it depends on communication by
family, school, and peers. Public administration is no longer primarily, the direct execution of government
programs. Much of it now is administration by proxy, the delegation to and supervision of activities by third parties
– state and local governments, profit-oriented corporations, and nonprofit organization. This new mission calls for
a degree of sophistication continuing awareness that government is different, with obligations that eclipse those of
the nongovernmental agents whose energies it enlist.

(CSLO 1, CSLO 4)

PA2000 https://www.softchalkcloud.com/lesson/files/2qWMPx1lVsHu0X/le…

2 of 2 7/7/20, 10:12 AM

PA2000
Unit 1: Study Review

Terminology

After reading the required chapters for this unit, you should understand the topic terminology listed below. Review the terminology in preparation for the assignments and assessments in this unit.

· partisan politics

· policy politics

· system politics

· administration

· politics

· Procedural issues

· substantive issues

· interest groups

· federalism

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Search SEP

Presocratic Philosophy
First published Sat Mar 10, 2007; substantive revision Mon Jun 22, 2020

The Presocratics were 6 a

nd

5 century BCE Greek thinkers who introduced a new way of
inquiring into the world and the place of human beings in it. They were recognized in antiquity
as the first philosophers and scientists of the Western tradition. This article is a general
introduction to the most important Presocratic philosophers and the main themes of Presocratic
thought. More detailed discussions can be found by consulting the articles on these philosophers
(and related topics) in the SEP (listed below).

For over a century, the standard collection of texts for the Presocratics has been that by H. Diels
revised by W. Kranz (abbreviated as DK). DK provides the original language of the texts, usually
Greek or Latin, with translation in German. In 2016, a new collection was published by A. Laks
and G. Most with original texts and translation into English (abbreviated as LM; a version wi

th

French translations was also published in 2016). In DK, each thinker is assigned an identifying
chapter number (e.g., Heraclitus is 22, Anaxagoras 59); then the reports from ancient authors
about that thinker’s life and thought are collected in a section of “testimonies” (A) and numbered
in order, while the passages the editors take to be direct quotations are collected and numbered in
a section of “fragments” (B). Alleged imitations in later authors are sometimes added in a section
labeled C. Thus, each piece of text can be uniquely identified: DK59B12.3 identifies line 3 of
Anaxagoras fragment 12; DK22A1 identifies testimonium 1 on Heraclitus.

A similar system is adopted in LM. (LM provide helpful concordances to DK.) Section P
contains passages dealing wi

th th

e life and works of the author (overlapping in some ways with
DK’s A section); section D includes passages covering doctrine with direct quotations in
boldface font (thus overlapping with DKB and somewhat with DKA); and a section R includes
reaction to the author (Reception) and texts the editors deem to be ancient forgeries or imitations.
Like DK, LM assign an identifying number to each thinker and numbers to each piece of text:
LM25D27 picks out Anaxagoras (25) doctrine number 27 (= DK59B12), LM25P37 is the same
text as DK59A30, and LM25D94 is DK59A117.

1. Who Were the Presocratic Philosophers?
2. The Milesians
3. Xenophanes of Colophon and Heraclitus of Ephesus
4. Parmenides of Elea

5. The Pythagorean Tradition
6. Other Eleatics: Zeno and Melissus
7. The Pluralists: Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and Empedocles of Acragas
8. Presocratic Atomism

9. Diogenes of Apollonia and the Sophists
10. The Presocratic Legacy
Bibliography

Primary Sources: Texts and Translations

Secondary Literature
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries

1. Who Were the Presocratic Philosophers?
Fragmentary evidence complicates our understanding of the Presocratics. Most of them wrote at
least one “book” (short pieces of prose writing, or, in some cases, poems), but no complete work
survives. Instead, we depend on later philosophers, historians, and compilers of collections of
ancient wisdom for disconnected quotations (fragments) and reports about their views
(testimonia). In some cases, these sources were themselves able to consult the works of the
Presocratics directly. In many others, the line is indirect and often depends on the work of
Hippias, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Simplicius, and other ancient philosophers who did have direct
access. All of the sources for the fragments and testimonia made selective use of the material
available to them, in accordance with their own special, and varied, interests in the early
thinkers. (For analyses of the doxographic tradition, and the influence of Aristotle a

nd

Theophrastus on later sources, see Mansfeld 1999; Runia 2008; Mansfeld and Runia 1997,
2009a, and 2009b; Laks and Most, 2016.) Despite (or perhaps because of) the fragmentary nature
of the evidence, new material occasionally comes to light. In 1962 “The Derveni Papyrus,”
probably dating from the second part of the fourth century B.C.E., was discovered in Greece
(Betegh 2004, Janko 2001, Kotwick 2017). It is primarily concerned with Orphic religion,
including a commentary on a poem attributed to Orpheus. Through the work of scholars to
reconstruct and interpret it (see Kouremenos, Pássoglou, & Tantsanaglou 2006) it has become
clear that the author of the commentary was familiar with the philosophical theories of the time,
and the papyrus has proved valuable to the study of early Greek Philosophy (see, for instance
Betegh 2014a and 2014b, and Betegh & Piano 2019). Further new Presocratic material was
found in a papyrus from Upper Egypt, now in Strasbourg, that contains texts from Empedocles,
some already included in DK, but also previously unknown lines which have complicated our
understanding of Empedocles’ thought. (See Martin & Primavesi 1999, and Janko 2001, 2005.)
Although any account of Presocratic thinkers has to be a reconstruction, we should not be overly
pessimistic about the possibility of reaching a historically responsible understanding of them.

Calling this group Presocratic raises certain difficulties. The term, coined in the eighteenth
century, was made current by Hermann Diels in the nineteenth, and was meant to mark a contrast
between Socrates who was interested in moral problems, and his predecessors, who were
supposed to be primarily concerned with cosmological and physical speculation. “Presocratic,” if
taken strictly as a chronological term, is not accurate, for the last of them were contemporaneous
with Socrates and even Plato. Moreover, several of the early Greek thinkers explored questions
about ethics and the best way to live a human life. The term may also suggest that these thinkers
are somehow inferior to Socrates and Plato, of interest only as their predecessors, and its
suggestion of archaism may imply that philosophy only becomes interesting when we arrive at
the classical period of Plato and Aristotle. Some scholars now deliberately avoid the term, but if
we take it to refer to the early Greek thinkers who were not influenced by the views of Socrates,
whether his predecessors or contemporaries, there is probably no harm in using it. (For
discussions of the notion of Presocratic philosophy, see Long’s introduction in Long (ed.) 1999,
Laks 2006, the articles in Laks and Louguet 2002, and Laks 2018.)

A second problem lies in referring to these thinkers as philosophers. That is almost certainly not
how they could have described themselves. While it is true that Heraclitus says that “those who
are lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into many things” (DK22B35/LM9D40), the word he
uses, philosophos, does not have the special sense that it acquires in the works of Plato and
Aristotle, when the philosopher is contrasted with both the ordinary person and other experts,
including the sophist (particularly in Plato), or in the resulting modern sense in which we can
distinguish philosophy from physics or psychology. Yet the Presocratics certainly saw
themselves as set apart from ordinary people and also from others (certain of the poets and
historical writers, for example, as we can see from Xenophanes and Heraclitus) who were their
predecessors and contemporaries. As the fragment from Heraclitus shows, the early Greek
philosophers thought of themselves as inquirers into many things, and the range of their inquiry
was vast. They had views about the nature of the world, and these views encompass what we
today call physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, astronomy, embryology, and psychology
(and other areas of natural inquiry), as well as theology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
In the earliest of the Presocratics, the Milesians, it can indeed be difficult to discern the strictly
philosophical aspects of the views in the evidence available to us. Nevertheless, despite the
danger of misunderstanding and thus underestimating these thinkers because of anachronism,
there is an important sense in which it is quite reasonable to refer to them as philosophers. That
sense is inherent in Aristotle’s view (see, e.g., Metaphysics I, Physics I, De Anima I, On
Generation and Corruption I): these thinkers were his predecessors in a particular sort of inquiry,
and even though Aristotle thinks that they were all, for one reason or another, unsuccessful and
even amateurish, he sees in them a similarity such that he can trace a line of continuity of both
subject and method from their work to his own. The questions that the early Greek philosophers
asked, the sorts of answers that they gave, and the views that they had of their own inquiries
were the foundation for the development of philosophy as it came to be defined in the work of
Plato and Aristotle and their successors. Perhaps the fundamental characteristic is the
commitment to explain the world naturalistically, in terms of its own inherent principles. (For
discussions, see Sassi, 2006, 2018.)

By contrast, consider the 7 century BCE poem of Hesiod, his Theogony (genealogy of the
gods). Hesiod tells the traditional story of the Olympian gods, beginning with Chaos, a vague
divine primordial entity or condition. From Chaos, a sequence of gods is generated, often by
sexual congress, but sometimes no cause for their coming to be is given. The divine figures that
thus arise are often connected with a part of the physical universe, or with some aspect of human
experience, so his theogony is also a cosmogony (an account of the generation of the world). The
divinities (and the associated parts of the world) come to be and struggle violently among
themselves; finally Zeus triumphs and establishes and maintains an order of power among the
others. Hesiod’s world is one in which the major divinities are individuals who behave like
super-human beings (Gaia or earth, Ouranos or sky, Cronos — an unlocated regal power, Zeus);
some of the others are personified characteristics (e.g., Momus, blame; and Dusnomia,
lawlessness). For the Greeks, the fundamental properties of divinity are immortality (they are not
subject to death) and great power (as part of the cosmos or in managing events), and each of
Hesiod’s characters has these properties (even though in the story some are defeated, and seem to
be destroyed). Hesiod’s story is like a vast Hollywood-style family history, with envy, rage, love,
and lust all playing important parts in the coming-to-be of the world as we know it. The earliest
rulers of the universe are violently overthrown by their offspring (Ouranos is overthrown by
Cronos, Cronos by Zeus). Zeus insures his continued power by swallowing his first consort Metis
(counsel or wisdom); by this he prevents the predicted birth of rivals and acquires her attribute of
wisdom (Theogony 886–900). In a second poem, Works and Days, Hesiod pays more attention to
human beings, telling the story of earlier, greater creatures who died out or were destroyed by
themselves or Zeus. Humans were created by Zeus, are under his power, and are subject to his
judgment and to divine intervention for either good or ill. Hesiod’s world, like Homer’s, is one
that is god-saturated, where the gods may intervene in all aspects of the world, from the weather
to mundane particulars of human life, acting on the ordinary world order, in a way that humans,
limited as they are by time, location, and narrow powers of perception, must accept but cannot
ultimately understand. The Presocratics reject this account, instead seeing the world as a kosmos,
an ordered natural arrangement that is inherently intelligible and not subject to supra-natural
intervention. A striking example is Xenophanes DK21B32/LM8D9: “And she whom they call
Iris, this too is by nature cloud / purple, red, and greeny yellow to behold.” Iris, the rainbow,
traditional messenger of the gods, is after all, not supra-natural, not a sign from the gods on
Olympus who are outside of and immune from the usual world order; rather it is, in its essence,
colored cloud. (A good discussion of the Hesiodic myths in relation to Presocratic philosophy
can be found in McKirahan 2011. Burkert 2008 surveys influence from the east on the
development of Presocratic philosophy, especially the myths, astronomy, and cosmogony of the
Babylonians, Persians, and Egyptians.)

Calling the Presocratics philosophers also suggests that they share a certain outlook; an outlook
that can be contrasted with that of other early Greeks (see Moore 2020). Although scholars
disagree about the extent of the divergence between the early Greek philosophers and their non-
philosophical predecessors and contemporaries, it is evident that Presocratic thought exhibits a
difference not only in its understanding of the nature of the world, but also in its view of the sort
of explanation of it that is possible. This is clear in Heraclitus. Although Heraclitus asserts that
those who love wisdom must be inquirers into many things, inquiry alone is not sufficient. At
DK22B40/LMD20 he rebukes four of his predecessors: “Much learning does not teach
understanding; else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and
Hecataeus.” Heraclitus’ implicit contrast is with himself; in DK 22B1/LM D9 and D110 he
suggests that he alone truly understands all things, because he grasps the account that enables
him to “distinguish each thing in accordance with its nature” and say how it is. For Heraclitus
there is an underlying principle that unites and explains everything. It is this that others have
failed to see and understand. According to Heraclitus, the four have amassed a great deal of
information — Hesiod was a traditional source of information about the gods, Pythagoras was
renowned for his learning and especially views about how one ought to live, Xenophanes taught
about the proper view of the gods and the natural world, Hecataeus was an early historian — but
because they have failed to grasp the deeper significance of the facts available to them, their
unconnected bits of knowledge do not constitute understanding. Just as the world is a kosmos, an
ordered arrangement, so too, human knowledge of that world must be ordered in a corresponding
way.

2. The Milesians
In his account of his predecessors’ searches for “causes and principles” of the natural world and
natural phenomena, Aristotle says that Thales of Miletus (a city in Ionia, on the west coast of
what is now Turkey) was the first to engage in such inquiry. He seems to have lived around the
beginning of the 6 c. BCE. Aristotle mentions that some people, before Thales, placed great
importance on water, but he credits Thales with declaring water to be the first cause
(Metaphysics 983b27–33), and he then later raises the question of whether perhaps Hesiod was
the first to look for a cause of motion and change (984b23ff.). These suggestions are rhetorical:
Aristotle does not seriously imply that those he mentions are engaged in the same sort of inquiry
as he thinks Thales was. Two other Greek thinkers from this very early period, Anaximander and
Anaximenes, were also from Miletus, and although the ancient tradition that the three were
related as master and pupil may not be correct, there are enough fundamental similarities in their
views to justify treating them together.

The tradition claims that Thales predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BC (DK 11A5/LM 5P9, P10),
introduced geometry into Greece from Egypt (DK 11A11/LM 5P4, P5, R11), and produced some
engineering marvels. Anaximander is reported to have invented the gnomon (the raised piece of
a sundial whose shadow marks time); to have created a sphere of the heavens serving as an
astronomical and cosmological model (DK 12A1/LM 6P2, P4, P11); and to have been the first to
draw a map of the inhabited world (DK 12A6/LM 6P6, D4). Regardless of whether these reports
are correct (and in the case of Thales’ prediction they almost certainly are not), they indicate
something important about the Milesians: their interests in measuring and explaining celestial
and terrestrial phenomena were as strong as their concern with the more abstract inquiries into
the causes and principles of substance and change attributed to them by Aristotle (Algra 1999,
White 2002 and 2008). They did not see so-called “scientific” and “philosophical” questions as
belonging to separate disciplines, requiring distinct methods of inquiry. The assumptions and
principles that we (along with Aristotle) see as constituting the philosophical foundations of their
theories are, for the most part, implicit in the claims that they make. Nevertheless, it is legitimate
to treat the Milesians as having philosophical views, even though no clear statements of these
views or specific arguments for them can be found in the surviving fragments and testimonia.

Aristotle’s comments do not sound as if they were based on first-hand knowledge of Thales’
views, and the doxographical reports say that Thales did not write a book. Yet Aristotle is
confident that Thales belongs, even if honorifically, to that group of thinkers that he calls
“inquirers into nature” and distinguishes him from earlier poetical “myth-makers.” In Book I of
Metaphysics, Aristotle claims that the earliest of these, among whom he places the Milesians,
explained things only in terms of their matter (Met. I.3 983b6–18). This claim is anachronistic in
that it presupposes Aristotle’s own novel view that a complete explanation must encompass four
factors: what he called the material, efficient, formal, and final causes. Yet there is something in
what Aristotle says. Aristotle links Thales’ claim that the world rests on water with the view that
water was the archē, or fundamental principle, and he adds that “that from which they come to
be is a principle of all things” (983b24–25; DK 11A12/LM 5D3, R9). He suggests that Thales
chose water because of its fundamental role in coming-to-be, nutrition, and growth, and claims
that water is the origin of the nature of moist things.

Aristotle’s general assertion about the first thinkers who gave accounts of nature (and his specific
discussion of Thales’ reliance on water as a first principle) brings out a difficulty in interpreting
the early Presocratics. According to Aristotle’s general account, the Presocratics claimed that
there was a single enduring material stuff that is both the origin of all things and their continuing
nature. Thus, on this view, when Thales says that the first principle is water, he should be
understood as claiming both that the original state of things was water and that even now (despite
appearances), everything is really water in some state or another. The change from the original
state to the present one involves changes in the material stuff such that although it may not now
appear to be water everywhere (but seems to be airier or earthier than water in its usual state, or
its original one), there is no transformation of water into a different kind of stuff (air or earth, for
instance). Yet, when Aristotle comes to give what details he can of Thales’ view, he suggests
only that for Thales, water was the first principle because everything comes from water. Water,
then, was perhaps the original state of things for Thales, and water is a necessary condition for
everything that is generated naturally, but Aristotle’s summary of Thales’ view does not imply
that Thales claimed that water endures through whatever changes have occurred since the
original state, and now just has some new or additional properties. Thales may well have thought
that certain characteristics of the original water persisted: in particular its capacity for motion
(which must have been innate in order to generate the changes from the original state). This is
suggested by Thales’ reported claims that the lodestone (with its magnetic properties) and amber
(which when rubbed exhibits powers of attraction through static electricity) have souls and that
all things are full of gods. Aristotle surmises that Thales identified soul (that which makes a thing
alive and thus capable of motion) with something in the whole universe, and so supposed that
everything was full of gods (DK11A22/LM5D10, D11a )—water, or soul, being a divine natural
principle. Certainly the claim that the lodestone has soul suggests this account. Given that the
analysis of change (both qualitative and substantial) in terms of a substratum that gains and loses
properties is Aristotelian (although perhaps foreshadowed in Plato), it is not surprising that the
earlier views were unclear on this issue, and it is probable that the Milesian view did not clearly
distinguish the notions of an original matter and an enduring underlying stuff (Graham 2006).

The reports about Thales show him employing a certain kind of explanation: ultimately the
explanation of why things are as they are is grounded in water as the basic stuff of the universe
and the changes that it undergoes through its own inherent nature. In this, Thales marks a radical
change from all other previous sorts of accounts of the world (both Greek and non-Greek). Like
the other Presocratics, Thales sees nature as a complete and self-ordering system, and sees no
reason to call on divine intervention from outside the natural world to supplement his account—
water itself may be divine, but it is not something that intervenes in the natural world from
outside (Gregory, 2013). While the evidence for Thales’ naturalistic account is circumstantial,
this attitude can be directly verified for Anaximander.

In the one fragment that can be securely attributed to Anaximander (although the extent of the
implied quotation is uncertain), he emphasizes the orderly nature of the universe, and indicates
that the order is internal rather than imposed from outside. Simplicius, a 6 c. CE commentator
on Aristotle’s Physics, writes:

Of those who say that [the first principle] is one and moving and indefinite, Anaximander,
son of Praxiades, a Milesian who became successor and pupil to Thales, said that the
indefinite (to apeiron) is both principle (archē) and element (stoicheion) of the things that
are, and he was the first to introduce this name of the principle. He says that it is neither
water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other indefinite (apeiron) nature,
from which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them; and those things, from which
there is coming-to-be for the things that are, are also those into which is their passing-away,
in accordance with what must be. For they give penalty (dikê) and recompense to one
another for their injustice (adikia) in accordance with the ordering of time—speaking of
them in rather poetical terms. It is clear that having seen the change of the four elements
into each other, he did not think it fit to make some one of these underlying subject, but
something else, apart from these. (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 24, lines
13ff. = DK12A9/LM6P5, D6, D12 and DKB1/LM6D6)

Thus, there is an original (and originating) indefinite stuff, from which all the heavens and the
worlds in them come to be. This claim probably means that the original state of the universe was
an indefinitely large mass of stuff that was also indefinite in its character. This stuff then gave
rise through its own inherent power to the ingredients that themselves constitute the world as we
perceive it.

A testimony about Anaximander from Pseudo-Plutarch (DK12A10/LM6P6, D4) says that
“Something productive of hot and cold was separated off from the eternal at the genesis of this
world and from this a sphere of flame grew around the air around the earth like the bark around a
tree.” Neither the cause nor the precise process of separation is explained, but it is probable that
Anaximander would have thought of motion as innate and so that the original source of change
was part of the character of the indefinite itself. The passage from Simplicius shows that
Anaximander does not think that the eternal indefinite stuff gives rise directly to the cosmos as
we know it. Rather, relying on a semi-biological model, Anaximander claims that the apeiron
somehow generates the opposites hot and cold. Hot and cold are themselves stuffs with powers;
and it is the actions of these stuffs/powers that produce the things that come to be in our world.
The opposites act on, dominate, and contain each other, producing a regulated structure; thus
things pass away into those things from which they came to be. It is this structured arrangement
that Anaximander refers to when he speaks of justice and reparation. Over the course of time, the
cycles of the seasons, the rotations of the heavens, and other sorts of cyclical change (including
coming-to-be and passing-away) are regulated and thus form a system. This system, ruled by the
justice of the ordering of time is in sharp contrast with the chaotic and capricious world of the
personified Greek gods who interfere in the workings of the heavens and in the affairs of human
beings (Kahn 1985a, Vlastos 1947, Guthrie 1962).

The pattern that can be seen in Thales and Anaximander of an original stuff giving rise to the
phenomena of the cosmos continues in the views of the third of the Milesians, Anaximenes. He
replaces Anaximander’s apeiron with air, thus eliminating the first stage of the coming-to-be of
the cosmos (the something productive of hot and cold). Rather, he returns to an originating stuff
more like Thales’ water. In DK13A5/LM7D1 and D7 Aristotle’s associate Theophrastus, quoted
by Simplicius, speculates that Anaximenes chose air because he agreed that a basic principle
must be neutral (as Anaximander’s apeiron is) but not so lacking in properties that it seems to be
nothing at all. Air can apparently take on various properties of color, temperature, humidity,
motion, taste, and smell. Moreover, according to Theophrastus, Anaximenes explicitly states the
natural mechanism for change; it is the condensation and rarefaction of air that naturally
determine the particular characters of the things produced from the originating stuff. Rarified, air
becomes fire; more and more condensed, it becomes progressively wind, cloud, water, earth, and
finally stones. “The rest,” says Theophrastus, “come to be from these.” Plutarch says that
condensation and rarefaction are connected with cooling and heating, and he gives the example
of breath (DK13B1/LM7D8,R4). Releasing air from the mouth with compressed lips produces
cool air (as in cooling soup by blowing on it), but relaxed lips produce warm air (as when one
blows on cold hands to warm them up).

Does the originating stuff persist through the changes that it undergoes in the generating
processes? Aristotle’s account suggests that it does, that Anaximenes, for instance, would have
thought that stone was really air, although in an altered state, just as we might say that ice is
really water, cooled to a point where it goes from a liquid to a solid state. Because the water does
not cease to be water when it is cooled and becomes ice, it can return to a liquid when heated and
then become a gas when more heat is applied. On this view, the Milesians were material monists,
committed to the reality of a single material stuff that undergoes many alterations but persists
through the changes (Barnes 1979, Guthrie 1962, Sedley 2007 and 2009). Yet there are reasons
to doubt that this was actually the Milesian view. It presumes that the early Greek thinkers
anticipated Aristotle’s general theory that change requires enduring underlying substances that
gain and lose properties. The earliest Greeks thought more in terms of powers (Vlastos 1947,
Heidel 1906), and the metaphysical problem of what it is to be a substance was yet to be
formulated. Clearly the Milesians were interested in the originating stuff from which the world
developed (Anaximander and Anaximenes are explicit about transformations of such an eternal
originating stuff), but the view that this endured as a single substratum may not have been theirs.
Rather, it has been suggested by Graham (1997 and 2006; Mourelatos 2008) that the Milesians
were not, in Aristotle’s sense, material monists. On this view, the original/originating stuff is
transformed into other substances. Anaximenes, for instance, may have thought that the change
from air to water does not involve the persistence of air as any sort of substratum. There is no
special role that air plays in the theory except that it is the originating stuff and so first in an
analysis of the law-like cyclical changes that produce various stuffs as the cosmos develops
(Graham 2006, ch. 4). Such an interpretation suggests how different the Milesian conception of
the world is from Aristotle’s.

3. Xenophanes of Colophon and Heraclitus of
Ephesus
Living in the last years of the 6 c. and the beginning of the 5 , Xenophanes and Heraclitus
continue the Milesian interest in the nature of the physical world, and both offer cosmological
accounts; yet they go further than the Milesians not only through their focus on the human
subject and the expanded range of their physical explanations, but by investigating the nature of
inquiry itself. Both explore the possibility of human understanding and question its limits.
Recent work on Xenophanes’ epistemology and his cosmology has made much of his scientific
work clearer and more impressive (Lesher 1992, Mourelatos 2008). He has, to a great extent,
been rescued from his traditional status as a minor traveling poet-sage who railed against the
glorification of athletes and made some interesting comments about the relativity of human
conceptions of the gods. Instead, he has come to be seen as an original thinker in his own right
who influenced later philosophers trying to characterize the realms of the human and the divine,
and exploring the possibility that human beings can gain genuine knowledge and wisdom, i.e.,
are able to have a god’s eye view of things and understand them (Curd 2013, Mogyoródi 2002
and 2006).

Xenophanes claims that all meteorological phenomena are clouds, colored, moving,
incandescent: rainbow, St. Elmo’s Fire, the sun, the moon. Clouds are fed by exhalations from
the land and sea (mixtures of earth and water). The motions of earth and water, and hence of
clouds, account for all the things we find around us. His explanations of meteorological and
heavenly phenomena lead to a naturalistic science:

She whom they call Iris, this too is by nature (pephuke) cloud
purple, and red, and greeny-yellow to behold. (DK21B32/LM8D39)

Xenophanes says that the star-like phenomena seen when aboard ship, which some call the
Dioscuri, are cloudlets, glimmering because of their kind of motion. (DkA39/LM8D38)

In the 1980’s Alexander Mourelatos argued that Xenophanes employs an important new pattern
of explanation: X is really Y, where Y reveals the true character of X. Xenophanes signals this by
the use of pephuke in DK21B32/LM8D39, and no doubt it (or some word like it) was there in the
original of DKA39/LMD36 as well. Xenophanes thus provides an account of a phenomenon
often taken to be a sign from the divine—Iris as the messenger; the Dioscuri (St. Elmo’s fire) as
comfort for sailors—that reduces it to a natural occurrence.

That meteorological phenomena are not divine is not all that Xenophanes has to say about the
gods. He notes anthropomorphic tendencies in conceptions of the gods (DKB14/LMD12:
“Mortals suppose that the gods are born, and have their own dress, voice, and body;”
DKB16/LMD13: “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and dark, Thracians, that theirs
are grey-eyed and red-haired”). He also famously suggests that horses, oxen, and lions would
have equine, bovine, and leonine gods (DKB15/LM14). Yet Xenophanes also makes positive
claims about the nature of the divine, including the claim that there is a single greatest god:

One god greatest among gods and men,
Resembling mortals neither in body nor in thought.
… whole [he] sees, whole [he] thinks, and whole [he] hears,
but completely without toil he agitates all things by the
thought of his mind.
… always he remains in the same (state), agitated not at all,
nor is it fitting that he come and go to different places at different times. (DK B23, B24,
B25, B26 / LM D16, 17, 18, 19)

While indifferent to the affairs of human beings, Xenophanes’ divine being comprehends and
controls a cosmos that is infused with thinking: it is understood, organized, and managed by
divine intellection. Having removed the gods as bearers of knowledge to humans, and denied that
the divine takes an active interest in what mortals can or cannot know, Xenophanes asserts the
conclusion to be drawn from his naturalistic interpretation of phenomena: the gods are not going
to reveal anything to us; we are epistemologically autonomous and must rely on our own
capacity for inquiry. That way, we “discover better,” as he says in DKB18/LMD53, a fragment
that is optimistic about the capacities of human intelligence (see Lesher 1991):

Indeed not even from the beginning did the gods indicate all things to mortals, but, in time,
inquiring, they discover better.

This suggests that human thought can mimic divine understanding, at least to some degree.
Xenophanes’ own practice seems consistent with the claims of DKB18/LMD53; his own
inquiries and explanations led him to unified explanations of terrestrial and celestial phenomena.
Yet DKB34/LMD49 suggests skepticism:

And of course the clear and certain truth no man has seen,
nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things;
for even if, in the best case, he should chance to speak what is the case,
all the same, he himself does not know; but opinion is found over all.

Whether this is global or limited skepticism is controversial (Lesher 1992 and 1994 argues for a
limited interpretation). Xenophanes stresses the difficulty of coming to certainty, particularly
about things beyond our direct experience. Nonetheless, in DKB35/LMD50 (a tantalizingly short
fragment), Xenophanes says, “Let these thing be accepted to be like the truth” (see Bryan 2012
for a full discussion).

Famously obscure, accused by Plato of incoherence and by Aristotle of denying the law of non-
contradiction, Heraclitus writes in an aphoristic style. His apparently paradoxical claims present
difficulties to any interpreter. Nevertheless, he raises important questions about knowledge and
the nature of the world. The opening of Heraclitus’ book refers to a “logos which holds
forever.” There is disagreement about exactly what Heraclitus meant by using the term logos,
but it is clear from DK22B1/LM9D1, D110, and R86 and DKB2/LM9D2 as well as
DKB50/LMD46 and other fragments that he refers to an objective law-like principle that governs
the cosmos, and which it is possible (but difficult) for humans to come to understand. There is a
single order that directs all things (“all things are one” DKB50/LMD46); this order is divine, and
is sometimes connected by humans with the traditional gods (it is “both unwilling and willing to
be called by the name of Zeus” DKB32/LMD45). Just as Zeus, in the traditional view, controls
everything from Olympus with a thunderbolt, so this single ordered system also steers and
controls the whole cosmos, but from within. The sign of the unchanging order of the eternal
system is fire—just as fire is always changing and always the same, the logos, itself permanent,
contains the unchanging account that explains the alterations and transformations of the cosmos.

This plan or order that steers the cosmos is, itself, a rational order. This means not only that it is
non-capricious and so intelligible (in the sense that humans can, at least in principle, come to
understand it), it is also an intelligent system: there is an intelligent plan at work, if only in the
sense of the cosmos working itself out in accordance with rational principles. Consider
DKB114/LMD105:

Those who would speak with understanding must ground themselves firmly in that which is
common to all, just as a city does in its law, and even more firmly! For all human laws are
nourished by one law, the divine; for it rules as far at it wishes and suffices for all, and is
still more than enough.

Heraclitus is not only claiming that human prescriptive law must harmonize with divine law, but
he is also asserting that divine law encompasses both the universal laws of the cosmos itself and
the particular laws of humans. The cosmos itself is an intelligent, eternal (and hence divine)
system that orders and regulates itself in an intelligent way: the logos is the account of this self-
regulation. We can come to grasp and understand at least part of this divine system. This is not
merely because we ourselves are part of (contained in) the system, but because we have, through
our capacity for intelligent thinking, the power to grasp the system as a whole, through knowing
the logos. How this grasping is supposed to work is tantalizingly obscure.

Heraclitus regards the cosmos as an ordered system like a language that can be read or heard and
understood by those who are attuned to it. That language is not just the physical evidence around
us (“Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to those with barbarian souls” DKB107/LMD33); the sheer
accumulation of information is not the same as wisdom (see the rebuke in DK22B40/LMD20,
quoted above). Although the evidence of the senses is important (see DKB55/LMD31), careful
and thoughtful inquiry is also necessary. Those who are lovers of wisdom must be good inquirers
into many things (DKB35/LMD40; also DKB101/LM36: “I enquired into myself”) and must be
able to grasp how the phenomena are signs or evidence of the larger order; as Heraclitus notes in
DKB123/LMD35, “nature is accustomed to hide itself,” and the evidence must be interpreted
carefully. That evidence is the interplay of opposing states and forces, which Heraclitus points to
by claims about the unity of opposites and the roles of strife in human life as well as in the
cosmos. There are fragments that proclaim the unity or identity of opposites: the road up and
down are one and the same (DKB60/LMD51), the path of writing is both straight and crooked
(DKB59/LMD52), sea water is very pure and very foul (DKB61/LMD78). The famous river
fragments (DKB49a/LMR9; DKB12/LMD65a, D102; DKB91a not in LM) question the identity
of things over time, while a number of fragments point to the relativity of value judgments
(DKB9, B82, B102 / LM D79, D81, D73). Anaximander’s orderly arrangement of just
reciprocity governed by time is replaced by a system ruled by what Heraclitus calls war: “It is
right to know that war is common and justice strife, and that all things come to be through strife
and are so ordained” (DKB80/LMD63). This strife or war is the set of changes and alterations
that constitute the processes of the cosmos. These changes are regular and capable of being
understood by one who can speak the language of the logos and thus interpret it properly (see
Long 2009). Although the evidence is confusing, it points to the deeper regularities that
constitute the cosmos, just as Heraclitus’ own remarks can seem obscure yet point to the truth.
Heraclitus surely has his own message (and his delivery of it) in mind in DKB93/LM41, “The
lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.”

One of the earliest of the Greek philosophers to discuss the human soul, Heraclitus’ claims about
it, like his other views, are expressed enigmatically. Yet it seems fairly clear that he treats soul as
the seat of emotion, movement, and intellect. DKB107/LMD33 (quoted above) indicates that
understanding is a function of soul, and in DKB117/LMD104, the drunken man who must be led
by a boy because he has lost control of his legs, and does not know where he goes or what he
does. Drunkenness is the cause of all this: because his soul has become wet its powers are
dampened down and become ineffective. DKB118/LMD103 asserts “gleam of light: dry soul,
wisest and best” (there is some uncertainty about the text). This suggests that for Heraclitus, soul
is a stuff that is affected by changes along the hot/cold and wet/dry continua and that the a fiery,
i.e., hotter soul is best. Indeed in DKB36/LMD100, soul is listed as one of the stages of
transformation of the cosmic stuffs: “it is death to souls to become water, and to water death to
become earth; from earth water comes to be, from from water, soul.” Although Heraclitus says
that it is only divine nature that has complete understanding (DKB78/LMD74), his linking of fire
with the logos and the divine, along with his view that the best and wisest soul is hot and dry,
suggests that humans who care for their souls and search for the truth contained in the logos can
overcome human ignorance and approach the understanding that Heraclitus himself has obtained.
(Betegh 2007, 2009, 2013b and Dilcher 1995 discuss the nature and importance of soul for
Heraclitus; see also Granger 2000 and Kahn 1979.)

4. Parmenides of Elea
Parmenides, born ca. 510 BCE in the Greek colony of Elea in southern Italy (south of Naples,
and now known as Velia), explores the nature of philosophical inquiry, concentrating less on the
contents of knowledge or understanding (although he has views about these) than on what sort of
thing can be understood. Xenophanes identified genuine knowledge with the grasping of the sure
and certain truth and claimed that “no man has seen” it, at least with respect to some topics
(DK21B34/LM8D49); Heraclitus had asserted that divine nature, not human, has right
understanding (DK22B78/LM9D74), although he implies that some humans can acquire divine-
like understanding. Parmenides argues that human thought can reach genuine knowledge or
understanding, and that there are certain marks or signs that act as guarantees that the goal of
knowledge has been reached. A fundamental part of Parmenides’ claim is that what must be
(cannot not-be, as Parmenides puts it) is more knowable than what is merely contingent (what
may or may not be), which can be the object only of belief.

Parmenides gives us a poem in Homeric hexameters, narrating the journey of a young man (a
kouros, in Greek) who is taken to meet a goddess who promises to teach him “all things”
(DK28B1/LM19D4). The content of the story the goddess tells is not the knowledge that will
allow humans, by having it, to know. Rather, the goddess gives the kouros the tools to acquire
that knowledge himself:

It is right that you learn all things,
Both the unshaking heart of well-persuasive truth,
and the beliefs of mortals, in which there is no true trust.
But nevertheless, you shall learn these things too, how it were right that the things that seem
be reliably, being indeed the whole of things. (DKB1.28–32/LMD4.28–32; the last two lines
text are uncertain.)

The goddess does not provide the kouros with a list of true propositions, as a body of knowledge
for him to acquire, and false ones to be avoided. Rather, in teaching him how to evaluate claims
about what-is, the goddess unleashes the kouros’ own cognitive powers to know everything, by
testing and evaluation, accepting or rejecting claims about the ultimate nature of things— for that
alone is capable of being known. For Parmenides, the mark of what is known is that it is
something that genuinely is, with no taint of what-is-not. That is why, for him, what-is not only
is, but must be and cannot not-be. He sets this out in the key passages of DKB2 and
B3/LM19D6:

Come now, and I will tell you, and you, hearing, preserve the story,
the only routes of inquiry there are for thinking;
the one that it is and that it cannot not be
is the path of Persuasion (for it attends upon truth)
the other, that it is not and that it is right that it not be,
this I point out to you is a path wholly inscrutable
for you could not know what is not (for it is not to be accomplished)
nor could you point it out… For the same thing is for thinking and for being.

The routes are methods of inquiry: keeping on the correct route will bring one to what-is, the real
object of thought and understanding. Although what the goddess tells the kouros has divine
sanction (hers), that is not why he should accept it. Rather, the truth she tells reveals a mark of its
own truth: it is testable by reason or thought itself. In DKB7/LMD8 the goddess warns that we
must control our thought in the face of the ever-present seductions of sense-experience:

For never shall this be forced through: that things that are not are;
but restrain your thought from this route of inquiry,
nor let much-experienced habit force you along this path,
to ply an aimless eye and resounding ear
and tongue, but judge by reasoning (logos) the much-battled testing
spoken by me.

The kouros himself can reach a decision or determination of the truth solely through use of his
logos. Logos here means thinking or reasoning (Parmenides probably means the human capacity
for thought in general). The test (restated at B8.15–16/LMD8.20–21, is “is or is not?” This is not
just a question of non-contradiction (which would give us coherence), but an inquiry whether or
not the supposition that something is would entail, on further examination, the reality of what-is-
not (which is impossible).

The arguments of DKB8/LMD8 demonstrate how what-is must be. In applying these arguments
as tests against any suggested basic entity in the Presocratic search for ultimate causes or
principles, the kouros can determine whether or not a proposed theory is acceptable. For
Parmenides noos is not itself an infallible capacity. One can think well or badly; correct thinking
is that which takes the correct route and so reaches what-is. The mortals on the incorrect route
are thinking, but their thoughts have no real object (none that is real in the appropriate way), and
so cannot be completed or perfected by reaching the truth. In B8 Parmenides sets out the criteria
for the being of what-is, and then the arguments for those criteria:

… a single account still
remains of the route that it is; and on this route there are
very many signs, that what-is is ungenerable and imperishable,
a whole of a single kind, and unshaking and complete;
nor was it nor will it be, since it is now all together
one, cohesive. (DKB8.1–6/LMD8.6–11)

Any thing that genuinely is cannot be subject to coming-to-be or passing-away, must be of a
single nature, and must be complete, in the sense of being unchangeably and unalterably what it
is. These are signs for what any ultimate cause or principle must be like, if it is to be satisfactory
as a principle, as something that can be known. The signs are adverbial, showing how what-is is
(Mourelatos 2008). Only an entity which is in the complete way can be grasped and understood
in its entirety by thought. McKirahan (2008) provides a thorough analysis of the arguments of
DKB8/LMD8, as do Palmer (2009) and Graham (2010).

After laying out the arguments about what-is, the goddess turns to the route of mortals, in an
account which she calls “deceptive.” Although Parmenides has been read as thus rejecting any
possibility of cosmological inquiry (Barnes 1979, Owen 1960), there are forceful interpretations
that allow for justified belief about the contingent world, a world that may or may not be, and is
not such that it must be (Nehamas 2002, Curd 2004, Palmer 2009). The problem of mortals is
that they mistake what they perceive for what there is (and must be). As long as one realizes that
the world of perception is not genuinely real, and cannot therefore be the object of knowledge, it
may be possible for there to be justified belief about the cosmos. Some details of Parmenides’
own cosmology are given, arguably as justified belief, in the Doxa section of the poem, and more
in the testimonia from later authors. Parmenides seems to have been the first Presocratic to claim
that the moon gets its light from from the sun and that the earth is spherical. Recently scholars
have focused on these claims about the natural world, and have argued that Parmenides should
be understood as offering an account of appearances that can and should be deemed acceptable
(Palmer 2009, Cordero 2010, Graham 2013, Mourelatos 2013, Bryan 2012, Johansen 2016).
Nevertheless, Parmenides marks a sharp distinction between being (what-is and must be) and
becoming, and between knowledge and perception-based belief or opinion.

5. The Pythagorean Tradition
In the last quarter of the sixth century, before Parmenides’ birth, Pythagoras of Samos (an
Aegean island) arrived in Croton, in southern Italy. He established a community of followers
who adopted his political views, which favored rule by the “better people,” and also the way of
life he recommended on what seem to have been more or less philosophical bases. The
traditional view has been that the aristocracy, the “better people,” generally meant the rich. But
Burkert notes that as early as the 4 c. BCE there were two traditions about Pythagoras, one that
meshes with the traditional view and associates Pythagoras with political tyrants, and another
that credits him with rejecting tyrannies for aristocracies that might not have been grounded in
wealth (Burkert 1972, 119). The Pythagorean Archytas (born late 5 century) lived in a
democracy (Tarentum in southern Italy), and seems to have argued for fair and proportionate
dealings between rich and poor (Huffman 2005). The Pythagorean way of life included
adherence to certain prescriptions including religious rites and dietary restrictions (there is a
general discussion in Kahn 2001). Detailed treatment of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism can be
found in Zhmud (2012 and 2013); an excellent collection of articles on Pythagoreanism is in
Huffman (ed.) 2014.

Like Socrates, Pythagoras wrote nothing himself, but had a great influence on those who
followed him. He had a reputation for great learning and wisdom (see Empedocles
DKD31B129/LM22.D38, R43), although he was treated satirically by both Xenophanes
(DK21B7/LM8.D64) and Heraclitus (DK22B40/LM9D20, DKB129/LMD26). We do not know
to what extent this included knowledge of mathematics, as would be suggested by the attribution
to him of the famous Pythagorean theorem of geometry (Rowett 2013). The details of
Pythagoras’ views are unclear, but he seems to have advocated the reincarnation of the soul (a
novel idea among the Greeks, also developed in Orphic religion) and the possibility of the
transmigration of the human soul after death into other animal forms. Pythagorean writers after
his own time stressed the mathematical structure and order of the universe. This is often
attributed directly to Pythagoras, but recent scholarship has shown that the evidence for
attributing this mathematically-based cosmology to Pythagoras himself is convoluted and
doubtful (Burkert 1972, Huffman 1993 and 2005; but see Zhmud 1997).

What seems clear is that the early Pythagoreans conceived of nature as a structured system
ordered by number (see the entry on Pythagoras), and that such post-Parmenidean Pythagoreans
as Philolaus (last half of the 5 century, more than a generation after Pythagoras’ death) and
Archytas (late 5 to early 4 century) held more complicated views about the relation between
mathematics and cosmology than it is reasonable to suppose Pythagoras himself could have
advanced. The Pythagorean tradition thus includes two strains. There are reports of a split in the
period after Pythagoras’ death between what we would term the more philosophically inclined
Pythagoreans and others who primarily adopted the Pythagorean ethical, religious and political
attitudes. The latter, called the acusmatici, followed the Pythagorean precepts, or acusmata
(which means “things heard”). The former, the philosophical Pythagoreans (including Philolaus
and Archytas), were the so-called mathematici, and while they recognized that the acusmatici
were indeed Pythagoreans by virtue of accepting Pythagorean precepts, they claimed that they
themselves were the true followers of Pythagoras.

Philolaus of Croton seems to have blended the Pythagorean life with an awareness of and
appreciation for the arguments of Parmenides (Huffman 1993). According to Philolaus, “Nature
in the cosmos was fitted together out of unlimiteds and limiters” (DK44B1/LM12D2). These
limiters and unlimiteds play the role of Parmenidean basic realities—they are and unchangingly
must be what they are, and so can be known; they are joined together in a harmonia (literally, a
carpenter’s joint; metaphorically, a harmony), and “it was not possible for any of the things that
are and are known by us to come to be, without the existence of the being of things from which
the cosmos was put together” (DK44B6/LM12D5, D14). The unlimiteds are unstructured stuffs
and continua; the limiters impose structure (shape, form, mathematical structure) on the
unlimiteds. Things become knowable because they are structured in this way; the structure can
apparently be expressed in a numerical ratio that allows for understanding: “All things that are
known have number; for without this nothing whatever could possibly be thought of or known”
(DK44B4/LMD7). Philolaus also developed a theory of the cosmos that displaced the earth from
the center, replaced by what he called Hestia, the central fire (Graham 2013, 2014), and offered
novel accounts of eclipses.

!! Browse Browse “” About About ## Support SEP Support SEP &

Entry ContentsEntry Contents

BibliographyBibliography

Academic ToolsAcademic Tools

$Friends PDF PreviewFriends PDF Preview

$Author and Citation InfoAuthor and Citation Info

%%Back to TopBack to Top

th th

th
th
th

[1]

[2]

th th

[3]

[4]

[5]

th
th
th
th th

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/#

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/#

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/#

https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/preview/presocratics/

https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=presocratics

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-1

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-2

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-3

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-4

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-5

6. Other Eleatics: Zeno and Melissus
Parmenides had argued that there were strict metaphysical requirements on any object of
knowledge; the later Eleatics (named for following Parmenidean doctrines rather than for strictly
geographical reasons), Zeno of Elea (born ca. 490) and Melissus of Samos (fl. ca. 440), extended
and explored the consequences of his arguments. Zeno paid particular attention to the contrast
between the requirements of logical argument and the evidence of the senses (Vlastos 1967 is a
masterly treatment of Zeno; see also McKirahan 1999 and 2005). The four famous paradoxes of
motion, for which he is now and in antiquity best known, purported to show that, despite the
evidence all around us, the ordinary motion of everyday experience is impossible. The paradoxes
claim that motions can never be begun (the Achilles) or be completed (the Dichotomy), entail
contradictions (the Moving Blocks), or are altogether impossible (the Arrow). Recent
philosophers of space and time (see Grünbaum 1967, articles in Salmon 2001, Huggett 1999, and
the entry on Zeno’s Paradoxes) hold that the arguments are reductios of the theses that space and
time are continuous (the Achilles and the Dichotomy) or discrete (the Moving Blocks and the
Arrow). Consider the Dichotomy: a runner can never complete a run from point A to point B.
First, the runner must move from A to a point halfway between A and B (call it C). But between
A and C there is yet another halfway point (D), and the runner must first reach D. But between A
and D there is yet another halfway point … and so on, ad infinitum. So the runner, starting at A,
can never reach B. The argument assumes that it is impossible to pass an infinite number of
points in a finite time. Similarly, Zeno produced paradoxes showing that plurality is impossible:
if things are many, contradictions follow (Plato’s Parmenides 127e1ff.; Zeno in
DK29B1/LM20D5, D6; DK29B2/LM20D7, R6; and DK29B3/LM20D11); there were also
purported proofs that place is impossible (DK29A24/LM20D13a, R22, R23) and that things
cannot have parts (the Millet Seed, DK29A29/LM20D12a, D12b, R16).

Melissus, dismissed as a simple-minded thinker by Aristotle (and by some contemporary
scholars as well but see Makin 2005), expands Parmenides’ arguments about the nature of what-
is (Palmer 2004). It is Melissus who explicitly claims that only one thing can be: if what-is is
unlimited (as he thinks it is), it must be one and all alike (if there were two [in number or in
character] they would be “limited against each other” DK30B6/LM21D6). Melissus specifically
argues against the empty (the void), and rejects the possibility of rearrangement (which would
allow for the appearance of coming-to-be and passing-away, and of movement)—all these
characteristics are incompatible with the unity of what-is (i.e., the One). Melissus thus claims
that what is real is completely unlike the world that we experience: the split between appearance
and reality is complete and unbridgeable.

7. The Pluralists: Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and
Empedocles of Acragas
While Zeno and Melissus reinforced Parmenides’ distinction between what-is (i.e., what must be)
and what appears, other post-Parmenidean thinkers accepted Parmenides’ arguments against
coming-to-be and passing-away (as characterizing what-is), and about the stable nature of what
is ultimately real, and argued that these arguments did not rule out the possibility of
metaphysically-based (or rational) cosmology. Both Anaxagoras and Empedocles worked within
the Parmenidean pattern while developing distinct cosmological systems that addressed their
own particular concerns (especially in the case of Empedocles, concerns about the proper way to
live).

Anaxagoras (writing in the mid-5 c.) claims, “The Greeks [i.e., ordinary people] do not think
correctly about coming-to-be and passing-away; for no thing comes to be or passes away, but is
mixed together and dissociated from the things that are. And thus they would be correct to call
coming-to-be mixing-together and passing-away dissociating” (DK59B17/LM25D15). What
seem to be generated objects (human beings, plants, animals, the moon, the stars) are instead
temporary mixtures of ingredients (such as earth, air, fire, water, hair, flesh, blood, dense, dark,
rare, bright, and so on). Recent treatments of Anaxagoras (Marmodoro 2015, 2017) have
suggested that the ingredients are primarily powers that manifest themselves in the mixtures
produced. The original state was universal mixture: “All things were together, unlimited both
in amount and in smallness, for the small, too, was unlimited. And because all things were
together, nothing was evident” (DK59B1/LM25D9). This mixture is set into rotary motion by the
operation of Mind (Nous – DK59B12/LM25D27, DKB13/LM25DD29b, DK59B14/LM25D28;
see discussions in Laks 1993, Lesher 1995, Menn 1995, Curd 2007), a separate cosmic entity
that does not share in such mixture. As the rotation spreads out through the unlimited mass of
indistinguishably intermingled ingredients, the rotation causes a winnowing or separating effect,
and the cosmos as we know it emerges from the mixture. Moreover, not only were all things
together, they are even now all together, in a different way, despite the differentiations now
achieved. Everything is in everything (DK59B5, B6, B11/LM25D16, D25, D26), in some
proportions, however small or great – this is a move to prevent even the appearance of coming-
to-be from what-is-not.

Anaxagoras marks an important theoretical step in attributing the motion of his ingredients to an
independent, intelligent force (although both Plato and Aristotle were disappointed that his
theory was not properly—from their point of view—teleological; on this see Sedley 2007, Curd
2018). The rotation begun by Mind is causally responsible for the formation of the heavens and
the activities of the great masses of the earth and the water on the earth, as well as all
meteorological phenomena. Insofar as the causes of the operations of the heavens and the
phenomena apparent to us from day to day are the same at both the macro- and micro-level (the
rotations that cause the apparent motions of the stars are the same as those that govern the cycles
of weather and life and death on earth), we can infer the nature of what is real from what is
apparent (Anaxagoras’ scientific views are treated in Graham 2006 and 2013). Although we do
not perceive all things as being together, and the move to the ultimate explanations is an
inference, it is a legitimate one (“owing to their [the senses’] feebleness, we are not able to
determine the truth” yet “appearances are a sight of the unseen” DK59B21/LM25D5 and
DK59B21a/LM25D6).

A younger contemporary of Anaxagoras, Empedocles, who lived in Sicily, also recognized the
force of Parmenides’ arguments against coming-to-be and passing-away. (Empedocles also
adopts Parmenides’ poetic meter in order to tell his story.) Empedocles proposes a cosmos
formed of the four roots (as he calls them), earth, water, air, and fire along with the motive forces
of Love and Strife. It is often claimed that, for Empedocles, Love simply produces mixture and
Strife only causes separation. Empedocles’ view is more complicated, for both forces mix and
separate. Love unites opposed (unlike) things by pulling apart and then mixing these unlikes,
while Strife sets unlikes in opposition and segregates them, hence Strife mixes like with like. Just
as painters can produce fantastically lifelike scenes just by mixing colors, so the operations of
Love and Strife, using just the four roots can produce “trees and men and women, and beasts and
birds and water-nourished fish, and long-lived gods best in honors” (31B17). These are the things
that Empedocles calls “mortal,” and he even provides recipes. DK31B73/LM22D73 tells how
Kypris (the goddess Aphrodite, i.e. love) fashions shapes (or kinds): “she moistened earth in rain,
and gave it to quick fire to harden.” DK31B96/LM44D192 gives a recipe for bones; flesh and
blood both have the same recipe (earth, water, air, and fire in equal proportions), but differ in the
refinement of the mixture (DK31B98/LM44D58a and D190).

Like the other Presocratics, Empedocles has a cosmological theory, in his case, an unending
cycle involving the competition between Love and Strife. Love overcomes the separating
influence of Strife, bringing together unlikes and so preventing the clinging together of likes. The
triumph of Love results in the Sphere, which is a complete mixture because the four unlike roots
are as mixed (integrated) as possible. Strife breaks up the sphere by beginning to attract like to
like and so pulling the mixture apart, until, when it triumphs, there is complete segregation of the
roots. Love resists the separation of unlikes and the clinging together of likes, by trying to keep
unlike things mixed. The cosmos as we know it is a result of intermediate phases between the
two extremes of the triumph of one of the forces.

Although Empedocles gives an account of the cosmos, cosmology is not his sole interest. Both
fragments and testimonia show his keen attention to questions about perception and its role in
knowledge, the workings of the body, and psychology. Like the Pythagoreans, Empedocles
thought that how one lived was as important as one’s theoretical commitments (and that the two
were intimately connected). The ancient evidence seems to suggest that Empedocles was the
author of two works, commonly called in modern scholarship the Physics and the Purifications,
one cosmological and the other ethico-religious. The relation between the two works has been a
matter of some controversy. In the 1990s important new evidence from the Strasbourg Papyrus
showed unequivocally that the cosmological and ethico-religious aspects of Empedocles’ thought
are inextricably intertwined (Martin and Primavesi 1999, Primavesi 2008, Kingsley 1995),
although commentators still disagree about whether this new evidence supports the conclusion
that there was a single poem combining both. The correct philosophical understanding of the
physical world and the correct way to live cannot be separated from one another in Empedocles’
thought (a similar attitude appears in Heraclitus); one cannot fully understand the world without
living correctly. Like the Pythagorean, the Empedoclean way of life included dietary
restrictions and a story of transmigrating daimōns who seem to have some kind of personal
identity. (Marmodoro 2016 is a collection of recent work on Empedocles.)

8. Presocratic Atomism
The pluralism of Anaxagoras and Empedocles maintained the Eleatic strictures on
metaphysically acceptable basic entities (things that are and must be just what they are) by
adopting an irreducible pluralism of stuffs meeting these standards that could pass on their
qualities to items constructed from them. Ancient atomism responded more radically: what is
real is an infinite number of solid, uncuttable (atomon) units of matter. All atoms are made of the
same stuff (solid matter, in itself otherwise indeterminate), differing from one another (according
to Aristotle in Metaphysics 985b4-20=DK67A6/LM27D31 and R38) only in shape, position,
arrangement. Later sources say that atoms differ in weight; some scholars have argued that,
while this is certainly true for post-Aristotelian atomism, it is less likely for Presocratic atomism.
Recent scholarship has questioned this view, and find no reason to deny weight to Presocratic
atomism (Augustin 2015). In addition to the reality of atoms, the Presocratic atomists, Leucippus
and Democritus (Democritus was born in about 460 BCE in Abdera in Northern Greece, shortly
after Socrates was born in Athens), enthusiastically endorsed the reality of the empty (or void).

The void is what separates atoms and allows for the differences noted above (except weight,
which could not be accounted for by void, since void in an atom would make it divisible and,
hence, not an atom) (Sedley 1982; see also Sedley 2008).

Like Anaxagoras, the atomists consider all phenomenal objects and characteristics as emerging
from the background mixture; in the case of atomism, the mix of atoms and void (Wardy 1988).
Everything is constructed of atoms and void: the shapes of the atoms and their arrangement with
respect to each other (and the intervening void) give physical objects their apparent
characteristics. As Democritus says: “By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by
convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color: in reality atoms and void”
(DK68B125/LM27D14, D13a = DK68B9/LM27D4, D14, D15, D23a, R108). For example,
Theophrastus says that the flavors differ according to the shapes of the atoms that compose
various objects; thus “Democritus makes sweet that which is round and quite large, astringent
that which large, rough, polygonal and not rounded” ( Caus. Plant. 6.1.6 = 68A129/LM27D60).
Simplicius reports that things composed of sharp and very fine atoms in similar positions are hot
and fiery; those composed of atoms with the opposite character come to be cold and watery (in
Phys. 36.3–6 = 67A14). Moreover, Theophrastus reports that the atomists explain why iron is
harder than lead but lighter; it is harder because of the uneven arrangements of the atoms that
make it up, lighter because it contains more void than lead. Lead, on the other hand, has less void
than iron, but the even arrangement of the atoms makes lead easier to cut or to bend (de Sens.
61–63 = 68A135/LM27D64, D65, D66, D67, D69, D134, D147, D157, D158, D159a).

Adopting a strong distinction between appearance and reality, and denying the accuracy of
appearances, as we see him do in the above quotation, Democritus was seen by some ancient
sources (especially Sextus Empiricus) as a sort of skeptic, yet the evidence is unclear. It is true
that Democritus is quoted as saying, “In truth we know nothing; for truth is in the depths”
(DK68B117/LM27D24). So for him, the truth is not given in the appearances. Yet, even Sextus
seems to agree that Democritus allows for knowledge:

But in the Rules [Democritus] says that there are two kinds of knowing, one through the
senses and the other through the understanding. The one through the understanding he calls
genuine, witnessing to its trustworthiness in deciding truth; the one through the senses he
names bastard, denying it steadfastness in the discernment of what is true. He says in these
words, “There are two forms of knowing, one genuine and the other bastard. To the bastard
belong all these: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. The other, the genuine, has been
separated from this” [DK68B11/LM27D6, D20, D21, R108]. Then preferring the genuine to
the bastard, he continues, saying, “Whenever the bastard is no longer able to see more finely
nor hear nor smell nor taste nor perceive by touch, but something finer…”

Thus Sextus suggests that the evidence of the senses, when properly interpreted by reason, can
be taken as a guide to reality (the claim that “appearances are a sight of the unseen” is attributed
to Democritus as well as to Anaxagoras). We just need to know how to follow this guide, through
proper reasoning, so as to reach the truth—i.e., the theory of atoms and void (Lee 2005).

In addition to fragments advancing these metaphysical and physical doctrines, there are a number
of ethical fragments attributed to Democritus (but the question of authenticity looms large here);
although a passage reported in John Stobaeus seems to link moderation and cheerfulness with
small measured movements in the soul and says that excess and deficiencies give rise to large
movements (DK68B191/LMD226), it is unclear whether or how these claims are related to the
metaphysical aspects of atomism (Vlastos 1945 and 1946, Kahn 1985b). Democritus was
identified in antiquity with the idea of “good cheer” (euthumiē) as the proper guiding objective in
living one’s life. In this, as in other aspects of his philosophy, he may have had some influence
on the formation of Epicurus’ philosophy a century later.

9. Diogenes of Apollonia and the Sophists
In the last part of the 5 century, Diogenes of Apollonia (active after 440 BCE) revived and
revised the Milesian system of cosmology, claiming that “all the things that are are alterations
from the same thing and are the same thing” (64B2/LM28D3); he identified this single basic
substance with air, like Anaximenes more than a century before (Graham 2006, Laks 2008,
2008a). Diogenes takes care to give arguments for the reality and properties of his basic
principle. In DK64B2/LM28D3 he says that only things that are alike can affect one another. If
there were a plurality of basic substances, each differing in what Diogenes calls their “own
proper nature,” there could be no interaction between them. Yet the evidence of the senses is
clear: things mix and separate and interact with one another. Thus, all things must be forms of
some one single thing. Like Anaxagoras, Diogenes claims that the cosmic system is ordered by
intelligence, and he argues that that “which possesses intelligence (noēsis) is what human beings
call air” (DK64B5/LM28D10). Humans and animals live by breathing air, and are governed by it
—in them air is both soul and intelligence, or mind (DK64B4/LM28D2). Moreover, Diogenes
argues, air governs and rules all things and is god (DK64B5/LM28D10). Thus, like Anaxagoras,
Diogenes has a theory grounded in intelligence, although Diogenes is more fully committed to
teleological explanations, insofar as he states explicitly that intelligence (noēsis) orders things in
a good way (DK64B3/LM28D56). In presenting his arguments, Diogenes fulfills his own
requirement for a philosophical claim. In DK64B1/LM28D2 he says, “In my opinion, anyone
beginning a logos (account) ought to present a starting principle (archē) that is indisputable and a
style that is simple and stately.” He notes that his theory that air is soul and intelligence “will
have been made clearly evident in this book” (DK64B4/LMD9).

Theophrastus says that Diogenes was the last of the physical philosophers, the physiologoi, or
“inquirers into nature,” as Aristotle called them; Diogenes Laertius (Lives II.16–17) gives that
title to Archelaus, saying that he was the teacher of Socrates (see Betegh 2013a). There was also
another group of thinkers active about this time: the Sophists. Many of our views about this
group have been shaped by Plato’s aggressively negative assessment of them: in his dialogues
Plato expressly contrasts the genuine philosopher, i.e., Socrates, with the Sophists, especially in
their role as teachers of young men growing into their maturity (youths at the age when Socrates,
too, engaged with them in his discussions). Modern scholarship (Woodruff and Gagarin 2008,
Kerferd 1981, Guthrie 1969) has shown the diversity of their views. They were not completely
uninterested in the theoretical problems that concerned others of the Presocratics. Gorgias of
Leontini questioned the possibility of the certainty that Parmenides sought. In his On Nature, or
On what-is-not, Gorgias claims that nothing satisfies (or can satisfy) Parmenides’ requirements
for what-is (Mansfeld 1985, Mourelatos 1987b, Palmer 1999, Caston 2002, Curd 2006).
Protagoras, too, doubted the possibility of the strong theoretical knowledge that the Presocratics
championed. The Sophists raised ethical and political questions: Does law or convention ground
what is right, or is it a matter of nature? They traveled widely, sometimes serving as diplomats,
and they were both entertainers and teachers. They gave public displays of rhetoric (this
contrasts with Diogenes of Apollonia’s comments about his book, which seems to imply a more
private enterprise) and took on students, teaching both the art of rhetoric and the skills
necessary for succeeding in Greek political life. With the Sophists, as with Socrates, interest in
ethics and political thought becomes a more prominent aspect of Greek philosophy.

10. The Presocratic Legacy
The range of Presocratic thought shows that the first philosophers were not merely physicists
(although they were certainly that). Their interests extended to religious and ethical thought, the
nature of perception and understanding, mathematics, meteorology, the nature of explanation,
and the roles of matter, form, causal mechanisms, and structure in the world. Almost all the
Presocratics seemed to have something to say about embryology, and fragments of Diogenes and
Empedocles show a keen interest in the structures of the body; the overlap between ancient
philosophy and ancient medicine is of growing interest to scholars of early Greek thought
(Longrigg 1963, van der Eijk 2008). Recent discoveries, such as the Derveni Papyrus, show that
interest in and knowledge of the early philosophers was not necessarily limited to a small
audience of rationalistic intellectuals. They passed on many of what later became the basic
concerns of philosophy to Plato and Aristotle, and ultimately to the whole tradition of Western
philosophical thought.

Bibliography
Primary Sources: Texts and Translations
Bollack, J., 1965 and 1969, Empédocle, vol. I, 1965; vols. II and III, 1969, Paris: Les Éditions de

Minuit.

Coxon, A. H., 2009, The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction and
Translation, the Ancient Testimonia, and a Commentary, edited and with new translations
by Richard McKirahan, Las Vegas: Parmenides

Publishing.

Curd, P., 2007, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: Fragments. Text and Translation with Notes and
Essays, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Diels, H., 1879, Doxographi Graeci, 4 edn.; reprinted Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965.
Diels, H. and W. Kranz, 1974, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, three vols., original edn. 1903;

reprint of 6 edn., Berlin: Weidmann.

Gallop, D., 1984, Parmenides of Elea: Fragments, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gemelli Marciano, M. L., 2011–2013, Die Vorsokratiker: Auswahl der Fragmente und

Zeugnisse, 3 volumes, Berlin: De

Gruyter.

Graham, D. W. (ed.), 2010, The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and

Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics, two volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Huffman, C., 1993, Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

–––, 2005, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher, and Mathematician King,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Inwood, B., 1992, The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation with an Introduction,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Second ed., 2001.

Janko, R., 2005, “Empedocles On Nature I 233–364: a New Reconstruction of P. Strasb. gr.. Inv.
1665–6,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 150: 1–25 (with 4 plates).

Kahn, C. H., 1979, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

–––, 1985a, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, corrected reprint of Columbia
University Press edn., 1960; Philadelphia: Centrum Philadelphia; repr. Indianapolis and
Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 1994.

Kirk, G. S., 1954, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kotwick, M., 2017, Der Papyrus von Derveni: Griesch-deutsch, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Kouremenos, Theokritos; George M. Parássoglou; Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou; 2006, The Derveni

Papyrus. Edited with Introduction and Commentary. Studi e testi per il “Corpus dei papiri
filosofici greci e latini,” Volume 13, Florence: Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki.

Laks, A., 2008, Diogène d’Apollonie: La Dernière Comologie Présocratique, 2 edition: Sankt
Augustin: Academia Verlag.

Laks, A., and G. Most, 2016a, Early Greek Philosophy, 9 volumes, Cambridge MA and London:
Harvard University Press (The Loeb Classical Library).

Laks, A., and G. Most, 2016b, Les débuts de la Philosophie, Paris: Fayard.
Lanza, D., 1966, Anassagora: Testimonianze e Frammenti, Florence: La Nuova Italia.

Lesher, J., 1992, Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Luria, S., 1970, Democritea, Leningrad: Nauka.
Mansfeld, J. and O. Primavesi, 2012, Die Vorsokratiker; Griechisch / Deutsch: Ausgewählt,

übersetzt und erläutert, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, Jun.
Marcovich, M., 1967, Heraclitus: Greek Text with a Short Commentary (Editio Maior), Merida,

Venezuela: Los Andes University Press.

Martin, A. and O. Primavesi, 1999, L’Empédocle de Strasbourg, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Mouraviev, S., 1999–, Heraclitea : Édition critique complète des témoignages sur la vie et

l’oeuvre d’Héraclite d’Éphèse et des vestiges de son livre et de sa pensée. 9+ vols., Sankt
Augustin: Academia Verlag.

O’Brien, D. (with J. Frère), 1987, Le Poème de Parménide: Texte, Traduction, Essai Critique =
P. Aubenque (gen. ed.), Études sur Parménide, i. Paris: J. Vrin.

Primavesi, O., 2008, Empedokles Physika I: Eine Rekonstruktion des zentralen Gedankegangs,
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Reale, G., 1970, Melisso: Testimonianze e Frammenti, Florence: La Nuova Italia.
Robinson, T. M., 1979, Contrasting Arguments: An Edition of the “Dissoi Logoi,”, New York:

Arno Press.
–––, 1987, Heraclitus: Fragments, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Sider, D., 2005, The Fragments of Anaxagoras: Edited with an Introduction and Commentary,

2 edn., Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.

Sprague, R. K. (ed.), 2001, The Older Sophists, Indianapolis and Cambridge MA: Hackett
Publishing; corrected reprint of 1972 edition; Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina
Press.

Taylor, C. C. W., 1999, The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.

Tarán, L., 1965, Parmenides, Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

Wright, M. R., 1981, Empedocles: The Extant Fragments, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Secondary Literature
Note: In order to be useful to readers, this bibliography includes both general accounts of and
introductions to Presocratic philosophy, as well as more specialized material. Edited volumes
contain collections of articles, not all of which are listed individually in this bibliography.

Augustin, M. 2015, “Weight in Greek Atomism,” Philosophia, 45: 76–99.

Algra, K., 1995, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought, Leiden: E.J. Brill.
––– 1999, “The Beginnings of Cosmology,” in Long (ed.) 1999: 45–65.
Austin, S., 1986, Parmenides: Being, Bounds, and Logic, New Haven: Yale University Press.
–––, 2007, Parmenides and the History of Dialectic: Three Essays, Las Vegas: Parmenides

Publishing.

Baltussen, H., 2000, Theophrastus against the Presocratics and Plato: Peripatetic Dialectic in
the De Sensibus, Leiden

and Boston: Brill.

Barnes, J., 1982, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2 edition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Betegh, G., 2004, The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2007, “On the Physical Aspect of Heraclitus’ Psychology,” Phronesis, 52: 3–32.

–––, 2009, “The Limits of Soul: Heraclitus B45 DK. Its Text and Interpretation,” in Hülz
Piccone 2009: 391–414.

––– (ed.), 2013a The Divine and the Human in the Presocratic Age, special issue, Rhizomata,
1(2).

–––, 2013b, “On the Physical Aspect of Heraclitus’ Psychology: With New Appendices,” in
Sider and Obbink 2013: 225–261.

–––, 2013c, “Socrate et Archélaos dans Les Nuées,” in A. Laks and R. Saeta Cottone (eds.),
Comédie et Philosophie: Socrate et les“présocratiques” dans les Nuées d’Aristophane,
Paris: Rue d’Ulm, 391–414.

–––, 2014a, “Pythagoreanism, Orphism, and Greek Religion,” in C. Huffman 2014, 149–166.
–––, 2014b, “Pythagoreans and the Derveni Papyrus,” in Sheffield and J Warren 2014, 79–93.
–––, 2017, “Archelaus on Cosmogony and the Origins of Social Institutions,” Oxford Studies in

Ancient Philosophy, 51: 1–40.
–––, 2020, “The Motive Force of Fire and Heat in Early Greek Philosophy and Medicine,” in H.

Bartos and C. G. King (eds.), Heat, Pneuma, and Soul in Ancient Philosophy and Science,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 35–60.

Betegh, G. and V. Piano, 2019, “Column IV of the Derveni Papyrus: A New Analysis of the Text
and the Quotation of Heraclitus,” in C. Vassalo (ed.), Presocratics and Papyrological
Tradition, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 179–220.

Brancacci, A. and P.-M. Morel (eds.), 2007, Democritus: Science, the Arts, and the Care of the
Soul: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Democritus, Berlin and Boston: De
Gruyter.

Brown, L. 1994, “The verb ‘to be’ in Greek Philosophy: Some Remarks,” in S. Everson, ed.,
Language. Companions to Ancient Thought 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brunschwig, J. and G.E.R. Lloyd, 2000, Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge,
Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Bryan, J., 2012, Likeness and Likelihood in the Presocratics and Plato, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Burkert, W., 1972, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, E. L. Minar, Jr. (trans.),
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

–––, 2008, “Prehistory of Presocratic Philosophy in an Orientalizing Context,” in Curd and
Graham 2008: 55–85.

Burnet, J., 1930, Early Greek Philosophy, 4th edn., London: Adam and Charles Black.

Cartledge, P., 1999, Democritus, New York: Routledge.
Cassertano, G., 2007, Empedocle tra Poesia, Medicina, Filosofia, e Politica, Naples: Loffredo.
Caston, V., 2002, “Gorgias on Thought and its Objects,” in Caston and Graham 2002: 205–232.
Caston, V. and D. Graham (eds.), 2002, Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of A. P. D.

Mourelatos, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Co.

Cherniss, H., 1935, Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press.

Cordero, N., 2004a, By Being, It Is, Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing.
–––, 2004b, “La pensee s’exprime ‘grace’ à l’etre,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de

l’Etranger, 129(1): 5–13.
–––, 2010, “The ‘Doxa of Parmenides’ Dismantled,” Ancient Philosophy, 30(2): 231–246.

–––, 2019, “There is, evidently, a ‘Parmenides Physikos’ but …,” Archai, 25: 1–29.
Cornelli, G, 2013, In Search of Pythagoreanism: Pythagoreanism as an Historiographical

Category, Berlin: De Gruyter.
–––, 2016, “A review of Aristotle’s Claim Regarding Pythagoreans Fundamental Beliefs: All is

Number?,” Prometeus: Filosofia Unisinos, 17(1): 50–57.
Cornelli, G., R. McKirahan, and C. Macris, (eds.), 2013, On Pythagoreanism, Berlin: De

Gruyter.

Curd, P., 2004, The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, rev. edn. Las Vegas: Parmenides Press.

–––, 2006, “Gorgias and the Eleatics,” in Sassi 2006, 183–200.
–––, 2011, “New Work on the Presocratics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49: 1–37.
–––, 2013, “The Divine and the Thinkable: Toward an Account of the Intelligible Cosmos,”

Rhizomata, 1: 217–247.

–––, 2015, “Thinking, Supposing, and Physis in Parmenides,” Etudes Platoniciennes, 12: 1 –17.
–––, 2016a, “Empedocles on Sensation, Perception, and Thought,” Logical Analysis and History

of Philosophy, special issue on Ancient Epistemology, K. Ierodiakonou and P. S. Hasper
(eds.), 38–57.

–––, 2016b, “Powers, Structures, and Thought in Empedocles” Rhizomata, 4(1): 55–79.
–––, 2018, “Presocratic Accounts of Perception and Cognition,” in J. Sisko (ed.), Philosophy of

Mind in Antiquity (Volume I), London and New York: Routledge, 44–63.

–––, 2020, “Presocratic Natural Philosophy,” in L. Taub (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Ancient Greek and Roman Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 15–38.

Curd, P. and D. H. Graham (eds.), 2008, The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, New
York: Oxford University Press.

De Lay, H. (1980), “Pangenesis Versus Panspermia: Democritean Notes on Aristotle’s
Generation of Animals,” Hermes, 108(2): 129–153.

Dilcher, R., 1995, Studies in Heraclitus, Hildesheim: Georg Olms.

–––, 2006, “Parmenides on the Place of Mind,” in King 2006, 31–48.
–––, 2013, “How Not to Conceive Heraclitean Harmony,” in Sider and Obbink 2013, 263–280.
van der Eijk, P., 2008, “The Role of Hippocratic Medicine in the Formation of Early Greek

Thought,” in Curd and Graham 2008: 385–412.
Frede, D. and B. Reis, (eds.), 2009, Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy, Berlin: de Gruyter.

von Fritz, K., 1943, “NOOS and NOEIN in the Homeric Poems,” Classical Philology, 38: 79–
93.

–––, 1945 and 1946, “NOOS, NOEIN, and their Derivatives in Presocratic Philosophy
(excluding Anaxagoras) I,” Classical Philology, 40: 223–242; and II “The Post-
Parmenidean Period,” Classical Philology, 41: 12–34.

Furley, D., 1967, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
–––, 1983, “Weight and Motion in Democritus’ Theory,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy,

1: 193–209.

–––, 1987, The Greek Cosmologists, Vol. I: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and its Earliest
Critics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

–––, 1989, Cosmic Problems: Essays on Greek and Roman Philosophy of Nature, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Furley, D. J. and R.E. Allen (eds.) 1970 and 1975, Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, 2 vols.,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Furth, M., 1991, “A ‘Philosophical Hero?’ Anaxagoras and the Eleatics,” Oxford Studies in,
Ancient Philosophy, 9: 95–129.

––– 1993, “Elements of Eleatic Ontology,” in A. P. D. Mourelatos 1993, 241–270.
Gemelli Marciano, M. L., 2002, “Le contexe culturel des Présocratiques: adversaires et

destinataires,” in Laks and Louguet 2002: 83–114.
–––, 2008, “Images and Experience: at the Root of Parmenides’ Aletheia,” Ancient Philosophy,

28: 83–114.
Gill, M. L. and P. Pellegrin (eds.), 2006, A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, Oxford:

Blackwell.

Graham, D. W., 1994, “The Postulates of Anaxagoras,” Apeiron, 27(2): 77–121.
–––, 1997, “Heraclitus’ Criticism of Ionian Philosophy,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy,

15: 1–50.
–––, 2004, “Was Anaxagoras a Reductionist?” Ancient Philosophy, 24: 1–18.
–––, 2006, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy, Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

–––, 2013, Science Before Socrates: Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and the New Astronomy, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Graham, D.W. and E. Hintz, 2007, “Anaxagoras and the Solar Eclipse of 478 B.C.,” Apeiron,
40(4): 319–344.

Granger, H., 2000, “Death’s Other Kingdom: Heraclitus on the Life of the Foolish and the Wise,”
Classical Philology, 95: 260–81.

–––, 2010a, “The Proem of Parmenides’ Poem,” Ancient Philosophy, 28: 1–20.

–––, 2010b, “Parmenides of Elea: Rationalist or Dogmatist?” Ancient Philosophy, 30(1): 15–38.
–––, 2013a, “Early Natural Theology: The Purification of the Divine Nature,” in Sider and

Obbink 2013: 163–200.
–––, 2013b, “Xenophanes’ Positive Theology and his Criticism of Greek Popular Religion,”

Ancient Philosophy, 33(2): 235–271.
Gregory, A., 2007, Ancient Greek Cosmogony, London: Duckworth.

–––, 2013a, “Leucippus and Democritus on Like to Like and ou mallon,” Apeiron, 46(4): 446–
468.

–––, 2013b, “Parmenides, Cosmology, and Sufficient Reason,” Apeiron, 1: 1–32.
–––, 2013c, The Presocratics and the Supernatural: Magic, Philosophy, and Science in Early

Greece, London: Bloomsbury.
–––, 2016a, Anaximander: A Reassessment, London: Bloomsbury.

–––, 2016b, “The Pythagoreans: Number and Numerology” in S. Lawrence and M. McCartney,
(eds.), Mathematicians and their Gods: Interactions Between Mathematics and Religious
Beliefs, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 21–50.

Grünbaum, A., 1967, Modern Science and Zeno’s Paradoxes, Middletown: Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press.

Guthrie, W. K. C., 1962, 1965, 1969, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vols. I, II, and III,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

Hankinson, R. J., 2008, “Reason, Cause, and Explanation in Presocratic Philosophy,” in Curd
and Graham, 2008: 434–57.

Hasper, P. S. 1999, “The Foundations of Presocratic Atomism,” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy, 27, 1–14.

–––, 2006a, “Aristotle’s Diagnosis of Atomism,” Apeiron, 38(2): 121–156.
–––, 2006b, “Zeno Unlimited,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 30: 49–85.
–––, 2013, “Leucippus and Democritus,” in Sheffield and Warren 2013: 65–78.

Heidel, W. A., 1906, “Qualitative Change in Pre-Socratic Philosophy,” Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie (New Series), 19(12): 333–379.

–––, 1913, “On Certain Fragments of the Pre-Socratics: Critical Notes and Elucidations,”
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 48: 681–734.

Hermann, A., 2004, To Think Like God. Pythagoras and Parmenides: The Origins of Philosophy,
Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing.

Hölscher, U., 1970, “Anaximander and the Beginnings of Greek Philosophy,” in Furley and
Allen 1975, 281–322.

Huffman, C. A., 1999, “The Pythagorean Tradition,” in Long (ed.) 1999, 66–87.
–––, 2009, “The Pythagorean Conception of the Soul from Pythagoras to Philolaus,” in Frede

and Reis 2009: 21–43.
–––, (ed.), 2014, A History of Pythagoreanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huggett, N. (ed.), 1999, Space from Zeno to Einstein: Classic Readings with a Contemporary

Commentary, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hülz Piccone, E., (ed.), 2009, Nuevos Ensayos sobre Heráclito: Actas del Symposium
Heracliteum Secundum, Mexico City: UNAM.

–––, 2013a, “Heraclitus on Logos: Language, Rationality, and the Real,” in Sider and Obbink
2013: 281–302.

–––, 2013b, “Heraclitus on Physis,” Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 17(2):
179–194.

Hussey, E., 1972, The Presocratics, London: Duckworth.

–––, 1982, “Epistemology and Meaning in Heraclitus,” in M. Schofield and M. Nussbaum (eds.),
Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press: 33–59.

–––, 1999, “Heraclitus,” in Long (ed.) 1999: 88–112.
–––, 2006, “Parmenides on Thinking,” in King 2006: 13–30.
Inwood, B., 1986, “Anaxagoras and Infinite Divisibility,” Illinois Classical Studies, 11: 17–33.

Janko, R., 2001, “The Derveni Papyrus (Diagoras of Melos, Apopyrgizontes Logoi?): A New
Translation,” Classical Philology, 96: 1–32.

Johansen, T., 2016, “Parmenides’ Likely Story” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 50: 1–29.
Kahn, C., 1978, “Why Existence does not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy,”

Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 58: 323–334.
–––, 1985b, “Democritus and the Origins of Moral Psychology,” American Journal of Philology,

106: 1–31.

–––, 2001, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Indianapolis: Hackett.
–––, 2003, “Writing Philosophy,” in H, Yunis (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate

Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 139–61.
Kerferd, G. B., 1955/56, “Gorgias on Nature or That Which Is Not,” Phronesis, 1: 3–25.
–––, 1969, “Anaxagoras and the Concept of Matter before Aristotle,” Bulletin of the, John

Rylands Library, 52: 129–143. Reprinted in A.P.D. Mourelatos 1993: 489–503.

–––, 1981, The Sophistic Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Keyser, P. and Georgia L. Irby-Massie (eds.), 2007, The Routledge Biographical Encyclopedia of

Ancient Natural Science, Oxford: Routledge.
King, R. A. H., (ed.), 2006, Common to Body and Soul: Philosophical Approaches to Explaining

Living Behaviour in Greco-Roman Antiquity, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Kingsley, P., 1995, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean

Tradition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

–––, 2002, “Empedocles for the New Millennium,” Ancient Philosophy, 22: 333–413.
Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, 1983, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2 edition,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laks, A., 1993, “Mind’s Crisis: On Anaxagoras’ NOUS,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 3

(Supplementary Volume): 19–38.
–––, 1999, “Soul, Sensation, and Thought,” in Long (ed.) 1999: 250–70.

–––, 2001, “A Propos de l’Edition de l’Empedocle de Strasbourg,” Methexis 14, 117–125.
–––, 2006, Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique”, Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France.
–––, 2008, “Speculating about Diogenes of Apollonia,” in Curd and Graham 2008: 353–364.
–––, 2018, The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development and Significance, G.

Most, trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Translation of Laks 2006.)

Laks, A. and C. Louguet (eds.), 2002, Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie présocratique?, Lille:
Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.

Laks, A. and G. Most (eds.), 1997, Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Lee, Mi-Kyoung, 2005, Epistemology after Protagoras. Responses to Relativism in Plato,
Aristotle, and Democritus, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lesher, J. H., 1978, “Xenophanes’ Scepticism,” Phronesis, 23: 1–28.

–––, 1983, “Parmenides’ Critique of Thinking: The poluderis elenchos of Fr. 7,” Oxford Studies
in Ancient Philosophy, 2: 1–30.

–––, 1991, “Xenophanes on Inquiry and Discovery: An Alternative to the ‘Hymn to Progress’
Reading of Xenophanes’ fragment 18,” Ancient Philosophy, 11: 229–248.

–––, 1994, “The Emergence of Philosophical Interest in Cognition,” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy, 12: 1–34.

–––, 1995, “Mind’s Knowledge and Powers of Control in Anaxagoras DK B12,” Phronesis, 40:
125–142.

–––,1999, “Early Interest in Knowledge,” in A.A. Long (ed.) 1999, 225–249.
–––, 2008, “The Humanizing of Knowledge in Presocratic Thought,” in Curd and Graham, 2008,

458–484.
–––, 2013, “A Systematic Xenophanes?” in McCoy (ed.) 2013, 77–90.
Lloyd, G. E. R., 1966, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek

Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966; reprinted 1987 and 1992, Geo.
Duckworth & Co., and Hackett Publishing Co.

Long, A. A., 1993, “Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle in the ‘Sixties,’” in Mourelatos 1993: 397–425.
–––, 2009, “Heraclitus on Measure and the Explicit Emergence of Rationality,” in Frede and Reis

2009: 87–109.
–––, 1996, “Parmenides on Thinking Being,” in J. Cleary, (ed.), Proceedings of the Boston Area

Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy (Volume 12), Lanham MD: University Press of America:
125–51.

Long, A. A. (ed.), 1999, The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Long, A.G., (2019), Death and Immortality in Ancient Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Longrigg, J., 1963, “Philosophy and Medicine: Some Early Interactions,” Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology, 67: 147–175.

Louguet, C., 2001, “Reconstruction d’Arguments Presosocratiques: l’Example de l’apeiron
d’Anaximandre,” in J.-F. Pradeau and P.-M. Morel (eds.), Les Anciens Savants, Les Cahiers
Philosophiques de Strasbourg 12, 15–35.

–––, 2013, “Anaxagore: Analogie, Proportion, Identité” Philosophie Antique, 13: 117–145.

–––, 2016, “Aristote et les Presocratiques” in E. Berti and M. Crubellier (eds.) Lire Aristote,
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 11–23.

Mackenzie, M. M., 1988, “Heraclitus and the Art of Paradox,” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy, 6: 1–37.

Makin, S., 1982, “Zeno on Plurality,” Phronesis, 27: 223–238.
–––, 1989, “The Indivisibility of the Atom,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 71: 125–

149.

–––, 2005, “Melissus and his Opponents: The Argument of DK 30 B 8,” Phronesis, 50: 263–88.
Mansfeld, J., 1964, Die Offenbarung des Parmenides and die Menschliche Welt, Assen: Van

Gorcum.
–––, 1985, “Historical and Philosophical Aspects of Gorgias’ ‘On What is Not’,” in L. Montoneri

and F. Romano (eds.), Gorgia e la Sofistica: Atti del convegno internazionale, Lentini-
Catania, 12-15 dicembre 1983, Siculorium Gymnasium, N.S. a38, nos. 1–2 (Catania:
Università di Catania, 1985), reprinted in Mansfeld, 1990: 243–271.

–––, 1990, Studies in the Historiography of Greek Philosophy, Assen: Van Gorcum.

–––, 1999, “Sources,” in Long (ed.) 1999: 22–44.
–––, 2015b, “Parmenides from Right to Left,” Etudes Platoniciennes, 12(2), available online.
––– (ed.), 2016, Melissus between Miletus and Elea (Eleatica 2012), Sankt Augustin: Academia

Verlag.
–––, 2018, Studies in Early Greek Philosophy: A Collection of Papers and One Review, Leiden

and Boston: Brill.

Mansfeld, J. and D. T. Runia, 1997, Aëtiana. The Method and Intellectual Context of a
Doxographer, Vol. I: The Sources, Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill.

–––, 2009, Aëtiana. The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer, Vol. II: The
Compendium, two parts, Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill.

–––, 2010, Aëtiana. The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer, Vol. III: Studies in
the Doxographical Traditions of Ancient Philosophy, Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill.

Marmodoro, A., 2015, “Anaxagoras’s Qualitative Gunk,” British Journal for the History of
Philosophy, 23(3): 402–422.

–––, (ed.) 2016, Empedocles’ Metaphysics, special issue of Rhizomata, 4(1).
–––, 2017, Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras’s Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University

Press.
McCoy, J. (ed.), 2013, Early Greek Philosophy: The Presocratics and the Emergence of Reason,

Washington: Catholic University Press of America.
McDiarmid, J. B., 1953, “Theophrastus on the Presocratic Causes,” Harvard Studies in Classical

Philology, 61: 85–156.

McKirahan, R., 2005, “Zeno of Elea” in D. M. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2
edn.), New York: Thomson Gale, vol. 9, 871–879.

–––, 2008, “Signs and Arguments in Parmenides B8,” in Curd and Graham 2008: 189–229.
–––, 2011, Philosophy Before Socrates, 2 edition, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.
Menn, S., 1995, Plato on God as Nous, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Mogyoródi, E., 2002, “Xenophanes as a Philosopher: Theology and Theodicy,” in Laks and

[6]

th

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

th

[12]

th
th
nd
nd
nd
nd
nd
nd

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-6

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-7

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-8

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-9

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-10

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-11

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics/notes.html#note-12

Mogyoródi, E., 2002, “Xenophanes as a Philosopher: Theology and Theodicy,” in Laks and
Louguet 2002, 253–286.

–––, 2006, “Xenophanes’ Epistemology and Parmenides’ Quest for Knowledge,” in M. M Sassi,
2006, 123–160.

Moore, C., 2020, Calling Philosophers Names: On the Origins of a Discipline, Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Mourelatos, A. P. D. (ed.), 1993, The Pre-Socratics, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974;
reprinted Princeton: Princeton University Press.

–––, 1987a, “Quality, Structure, and Emergence in Later Presocratic Philosophy,” in J. Cleary
(ed.), Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 2, Lanham, MD:
University Press of America: 127–194.

–––, 1987b, “Gorgias on the Function of Language,” Philosophical Topics, 15: 135–70.
–––, 2005, “Intrinsic and Relational Properties of Atomism in the Democritean Ontology,” in R.

Salles (ed.) Metaphysics, Soul and Ethics in Ancient Thought: Themes from the Work of
Richard Sorabji, New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press.

–––, 2008a, The Route of Parmenides, revised and expanded edition, Las Vegas: Parmenides
Publishing; original edition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.

–––, 2008b, “The Cloud-Astrophysics of Xenophanes and Ionian Material Monism,” in Curd and
Graham 2008: 134–168.

–––, 2013, “Parmenides, Greek Astronomy, and Modern Scientific Realism,” in McCoy 2013:
91–112.

Nehamas, A., 1981, “On Parmenides’ Three Ways of Inquiry,” Deukalion, 33/34: 97–112;
reprinted in Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998,
125–137.

–––, 2002, “Parmenidean Being/Heraclitean Fire,” in Caston and Graham 2002: 45–64.

Nussbaum, M. 1972, “Psyche in Heraclitus,” Phronesis, 17: 1–16; 153–70.
O’Brien, D., 1969, Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 1981, Theories of Weight in the Ancient World, Vol. I: Democritus on Weight and Size: An

Exercise in the Reconstruction of Early Greek Philosophy, Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
–––, 1995, “Empedocles Revisited,” Ancient Philosophy, 15: 403–470.

Osborne, C., 1987a, Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the
Presocratics, Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press.

–––, 1987b, “Empedocles Recycled,” Classical Quarterly, 37: 24–50.
–––, 1998, “Was Verse the Default Form for Presocratic Philosophy?” in C. Atherton, (ed.),

Form and Content in Didactic Poetry, Bari: Levante: 23–35.
–––, 2000, “Rummaging in the Recycling Bins of Upper Egypt: A discussion of A. Martin and

O. Primavesi, L’Empédocle de Strasbourg,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 18: 329–
356.

–––, 2005, “Sin and Moral Responsibility in Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle” in Pierris 2005, 283–
308.

Owen, G. E. L., 1957/58, “Zeno and the Mathematicians,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 58: 199–222; revised edn. in Owen 1986: 45–61.

–––, 1960, “Eleatic Questions,” Classical Quarterly, 10: 84–102. Reprinted with additional notes
in Furley and Allen, vol. II: 48–81; revised edn. in Owen, 1986, 3–26.

–––, 1986, Logic, Science, and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.

Palmer, J., 1999, Plato’s Reception of Parmenides, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
–––, 2004, “Melissus and Parmenides,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 26: 19–54.
–––, 2009, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2014, “The Pythagoreans and Plato,” in C. Huffman (ed.) 2014, 204–226.

–––, 2016, “Elemental Change in Empedocles,” Rhizomata, 4(1): 30–54.
–––, 2018, “Contradiction and Aporia in Early Greek Philosophy,” in V. Politis and G.

Karamanolis (eds.), The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy, London and New York:
Routledge, 9–28.

–––, 2019, “Presocratic Interest in the Persistence of Soul upon Death,” in J. Sisko, (ed.),
Philosophy of Mind in Antiquity (Volume I), London and New York: Routledge, 1–22.

Patterson, R; V. Karasmanis, and A. Hermann, 2012, Presocratics and Plato: Festchrift at
Delphi in Honor of Charles Kahn, Las Vegas, Zurich, Athens: Parmenides Publishing.

Pierris, A. (ed.), 2005, The Empedoclean Kosmos: Structure,Process, and the Question of
Cyclicity, Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research.

Pinto, R., 2017, “Nous, Motion, and Teleology in Anaxagoras,” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy, 52: 1–32.

Popper, K. 1998, The World of Parmenides, London

and New York: Routledge.

Primavesi, O., 2001, “La Daimonologia della Fisica Empedocles,” Aevum Antiquum (New

Series) 1: 3–68.

–––, 2008, “Empedocles: Physical Divinity and Allegorical Myth,” in Curd and Graham 2008:
250–283.

–––, 2013, “Le Chemin vers la Revelation: Lumière et nuit dans las Proeme de Parmenide,”
Philosophie Antique, 13: 37–81.

Primavesi, O., and K. Luchner (eds.), 2011, The Presocratics from the Latin Middle Ages to
Hermann Diels, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

–––, 2016, “Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle and the Pythagorean Tetractys,” Rhizomata, 4: 5–29.

Raven, J. E., 1948, Pythagoreans and Eleatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Riedwig, C., 2002, Pythagoras, His Life, Teaching, and Influence, Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press.
Robbiano, C. 2007, Becoming Being: On Parmenides’ Transformative Philosophy, Sankt

Augustin: Academia Verlag.
Rowett, C. 2013, “Philosophy’s Numerical Turn: Why the Pythagoreans’ Interest in Numbers is

Truly Awesome,” in Sider and Obbink 2013: 3–31.

Runia, D. T., 2008, “The Sources for Presocratic Philosophy,” in Curd and Graham 2008: 27–54.
Salmon, W. C., 2001, Zeno’s Paradoxes, 2 edn., Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Sassi, M. M. (ed.), 2006, La costruzione del discorso filosofico nell’ età dei Presocratici, Pisa:

Edizioni della Normale.
–––, 2018, The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece, M. Assuni (trans.), Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Schofield, M., 1980, An Essay on Anaxagoras, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 1991, “Heraclitus’ Theory of Soul and its Antecedents,” in S. Everson, (ed.), Psychology,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 13–34.
–––, 1997, “The Ionians,” in Taylor, 1997b: 47–87.
Sedley, D., 1982, “Two Conceptions of Vacuum,” Phronesis, 27: 175–193.

–––, 1999, “Parmenides and Melissus,” in Long, 1999: 113–33.
–––, 2007, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press.
–––, 2016, “Empedoclean Superorganisms,” Rhizomata, 4(1): 111–125.
–––, 2008, “Atomism’s Eleatic Roots,” in Curd and Graham, 2008: 305–32.

Sheffield F. and J. Warren (eds.), 2014, Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy, New York:
Routledge.

Shields, C., 2012, Ancient Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction, 2 edition, New York and
London: Routledge.

Sider, D., 2013, “Heraclitus’ Ethics” in Sider and Obbink 2013: 321–334.
Sider, D. and D. Obbink (eds.), 2013, Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and

Pythagoras, Berlin: de Gruyter.

Solmsen, F., 1969, “The ‘Eleatic One’ in Melissus,” Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse
Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunds, Nieuwe Reeks 32/8: 221–233.

–––, 1971, “The Tradition about Zeno of Elea Re-examined,” Phronesis, 16: 116–41.
–––, 1988, “Abdera’s Arguments for the Atomic Theory,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies,

29: 59–73.
Sorabji, R., 1988, Matter, Space, and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and their Sequel, Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press.

Stokes, M., 1971, One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy, Washington, DC: The Center for
Hellenic Studies.

Strang, C., 1963, “The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie,
45: 101–118.

Taylor, C.C.W., 1997a, “Anaxagoras and the Atomists,” in C.C.W. Taylor (ed.), 1997b 208–243.
–––, (ed.), 1997b, Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. I: From the Beginning to Plato, London

and New York: Routledge.

Trépanier, S., 2003a, “Empedocles on the Ultimate Symmetry of the World,” Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy, 24: 1–57.

–––, 2003b, “We and Empedocles’ Cosmic Lottery: P. Strasb. Gr. INV.1665–1666 ensemble a,”
Mnemosyne, 56: 385–419.

–––, 2004a, “Empédocle: Les Pommes de la Discorde,” Phoenix, 58: 130–142.
–––, 2004b, Empedocles: An Interpretation, New York: Routledge.

–––, 2014, “From Wandering Limbs to Limbless Gods: daimon as Substance in Empedocles,”
Apeiron, 47(2): 172–210.

–––, 2017, “From Hades to the Stars: Empedocles on the Cosmic Habitats of Soul,” Classical
Antiquity, 36(1): 130–182.

–––, 2017, “Empedocles On Nature 1.273–287: Place, the Elements, and Still No ‘We’,”
Mnemosyne, 70(4): 562–584.

Vasallo, C. (ed.) 2019, Presocratics and Papyrological Tradition, Berlin and Boston, De Gruyter.

Vegetti, M., 1999, “Culpability, Responsibility, Cause: Philosophy, Historiography, and Medicine
in the Fifth Century,” in Long, 1999: 271–89.

Vlastos, G., 1945 and 1946, “Ethics and Physics in Democritus,” Philosophical Review, 54: 578–
592 and 55: 53–64; reprinted in Vlastos 1995: 328–350.

–––, 1947, “Equality and Justice in Early Greek Cosmologies,” Classical Philology, 42: 156–
178; reprinted in Vlastos 1995: 57–88.

–––, 1950, “The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras,” Philosophical Review, 59: 31–57; reprinted in
Vlastos 1995: 303–327.

–––, 1967, “Zeno of Elea,” in P. Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Volume 8), New
York: MacMillan, 369–379.

–––, 1975, “Plato’s Testimony Concerning Zeno of Elea,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 95: 136–
162.

–––, 1995, Studies in Greek Philosophy, Vol. I: The Presocratics, D. W. Graham (ed.), Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Warren, J., 2007, Presocratics, Tedington: Acumen.

–––, 2007, “Anaxagoras on Perception, Pleasure, and Pain,” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy, 33: 19–54.

Wardy, R. B. B., 1988, “Eleatic Pluralism,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 70: 125–146.
Waterfield, R., 2000, The First Philosophers, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
West, M. L., 1971, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

White, S., 2002, “Thales and the Stars,” in Caston and Graham 2002, 3–18.
–––, 2008, “Milesian Measures,” in Curd and Graham 2008: 89–133.
Wright, M.R. 2008, “Presocratic Cosmologies,” in Curd and Graham 2008: 413–433.
Woodruff, P. and M. Gagarin, 2008, “The Sophists,” in Curd and Graham 2008: 365–382.

Zeller, E., 1923, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer Geschichtlichen Entwicklung, W. Nestle
(ed.), 7 edn., Leipzig: O. R. Reisland.

Zeyl, D., 1997, Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Zhmud, L., 1997, Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Religion Im Frühen Pythagoreismus, Berlin:

Akademie Verlag.
–––, 2012, Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

–––, 2013, “Pythagorean Communities: From Individuals to a Collective Portrait,” in Sider and
Obbink 2013: 33–52.

Academic Tools
How to cite this entry.
Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society.
Look up this entry topic at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources
Presocratics, The History of Philosophy podcasts on the Presocratics, by Peter Adamson
(Philosophy, Kings College London).

The Perseus Digital Library
Project Theophrastus
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae
Fragments des Présocratiques (Presocratic fragments), in French, maintained by Gé
Journée, Centre Léon Robin, Paris IV-ENS.

IAPS (International Association for Presocratic Studies).
The Derveni Papyrus: An Interdisciplinary Research Project Center for Hellenic Studies.

Related Entries
Anaxagoras | Anaximander | Anaximenes | atomism: ancient | Democritus | Diogenes of
Apollonia | doxography of ancient philosophy | Empedocles | Gorgias | Heraclitus | Leucippus |
Melissus | Parmenides | Protagoras | Pythagoras | Pythagoreanism | Sophists, The | Thales |
Xenophanes | Zeno of Elea | Zeno of Elea: Zeno’s paradoxes

Copyright © 2020 by
Patricia Curd

Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative.
Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia Free

! Browse
Table of Contents
What’s New
Random Entry
Chronological
Archives

” About
Editorial Information
About the SEP
Editorial Board
How to Cite the SEP
Special Characters
Advanced Tools
Contact

# Support SEP
Support the SEP
PDFs for SEP Friends
Make a Donation
SEPIA for Libraries

‘ Mirror Sites
View this site from another server:

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2020 by The Metaphysics Research Lab,
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

nd
nd
th

USA (Main Site)
CSLI, Stanford University