The collection of nineteen articles in Jaap Mansfeld’s Studies in Early Greek Philosophy span the period from Anaximander to Socrates. Solutions to problems of interpretation are offered through a scrutiny of the sources, and also of the traditions of presentation and reception found in antiquity. Excursions in the history of scholarship help to diagnose discussions of which the primum movens may have been forgotten. General questions are treated, for instance the phenomenon of detheologization in doxographical texts, while problems relating to individual philosophers are also discussed. For example, the history of Anaximander’s cosmos, the status of Parmenides’ human world, and the reliability of what we know about the soul of Anaximenes, and of what Philoponus tells us about the behaviour of Democritus’ atoms.
Jaap Mansfeld is Professor Emeritus of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy in the University of Utrecht. He has published on Ancient Philosophy from the Presocratics to the Late Commentators, with a particular focus on ancient historiographical traditions relating to philosophy.
"Throughout Mansfeld’s new collection of papers on early Greek philosophy, we are reminded both of the achievement of Diels, and of the need to maintain a critical attitude to even such an august tool of philological, philosophical, and historical scholarship. Mansfeld is one of the best scholars to remind us of this point, as he, like Diels, and David Runia (Mansfeld’s colleague on the important Aëtiana project), is a master of the historiography of ancient Greek philosophy (not limited to the earliest Greek thinkers). This new volume brings together nineteen discussions of the Presocratics and of the history of scholarship dealing with them." - Patricia Curd, in: Gnomon 93.1 (2021)
Acknowledgements Introduction 1 DetheologizationAëtian Chapters and Their Peripatetic Background 2 Insight by HindsightIntentional Unclarity in Presocratic Proems 3 Bothering the InfiniteAnaximander in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond 4 Anaximander’s Fragment: Another Attempt 5 Anaximenes’ Soul 6 Minima ParmenideaExegetical Notes on 28B1.22–23a, B2.1–5, B6.3, and B8.38–41 DK 7 Parmenides from Right to Left 8 Parmenides on Sense Perception in Theophrastus and Elsewhere 9 Heraclitus on Soul and Super-SoulWith an Afterthought on the Afterlife 10 Alcmaeon and Plato on Soul 11 The Body PoliticAëtius on Alcmaeon on Isonomia and Monarchia 12 Aristotle on Anaxagoras in relation to Empedocles in Metaphysics A 13 “Das verteufelte Lastschiff”Philolaus 44B12 DK 14 Democritus on PoetryFragments 68B18 and B21 DK 15 Out of TouchPhiloponus as a Source for Democritus 16 The Presocratic PhilosophersA Discussion of a New Handbook 17 Protagoras on Epistemological Obstacles and Persons 18 Aristotle on Socrates’ Contributions to Philosophy 19 Hermann Diels (1848–1922) Index LocorumIndex Nominum et Rerum
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