Attain Los Filósofos Presocráticos: Historia Crítica Con Selección De Textos Picturized By Geoffrey S. Kirk Delivered In Leaflet

Raven, and Schofield provide useful notes in what is probably the best single Englishlanguage guide to the Presocratics, Supplies the reader with the writings of the preSocratic philosophers both in the original Greek and in English translation, Includes detailed commentary on the fragments and passages, showing how the different philosophic thoughts fit into each philosophers system, and how those thoughts and systems fit into the development of Greek preSocratic thought in general.
Moreover, the range of these early thinkers is impressive: not only is there metaphysics and ethics, but there is also dialectics, logic, the critique of anthropomorphism, paradox and atomism, started rereading paramenides take on metaphysics after a boozy night of argument at the local watering hole, which is more valid "the way of truth" or "the way of seeming" kirk and raven's book is by far the best out there for anything presocratic, they include the orginal greek fragments as well as their translations for those whose ancient greek has lapsed due to misuse.
while experiencing paramenides again there are hints and foreshadowing to baudrillard's theories on simulacrum, This was my favorite presocratic reference book back in college, Este libro explica de forma simple de qué manera se estudian los filósofos de la antigüedad, cómo se

analizan los rastros de su pensamiento pese a que muchos de ellos no dejaron ninguna obra escrita, o que la mayor parte de sus textos se perdieran.

Además de ser un libro apto para eruditos ya que presenta las citas en su lengua de origen y traducidas también permite comprender, para alguien no experto, leyendo aunque sea alguno de sus capítulos, la forma de pensar del filósofo presocrático que se estudie en mi caso, Tales de Mileto y también la forma de trabajar de los historiadores de la filosofía.
This book is very scholarly, very thorough, well researched, etc, and I found it gave me a very good overview of the presocratic philosophers, but it failed to be inspirational or enlightening or memorable, It was definitely worth reading, and it made very clear that we live today in such a different world to the presocratics that we must be careful about assuming how much we actually understand them, but in the end I didn't get all that much out of them.
The chapter on Zeno was absolutely terrible, and if I hadn't already read about Zeno's paradoxes I wouldn't have understood hardly a thing from their presentation the section on Parmenides was not very good either they could have made a lot more of their section on Heraclitus.
That naturally left me wondering about their presentations of other people, like Anaxagoras, who I knew nothing about, Anyway, as impartial scholars the authors were careful to keep their own personal interpretations to the minimum, but paradoxically, this material required personal interpretations to really speak to the modern mind.
So this book is more of a university textbook than a book for the general reader, It is as good as far as it goes, but for me it did not go nearly far enough, Since I'm no expert, I'll just quickly compare this to sitelinkPhilosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary, which I read parallel to KRS, and which has apparently recently superseded KRS as the standard sourcebook for the Presocratics, though the latter continues to enjoy a canonical status in the literature.


What KRS has on McKirahan:
The original Greek, which is occasionally useful even if that amounts to identifying particular words here and there, as it did for me
Fuller discussion of the history of interpretations, the derivation of interpretations from the sources, and the reliability of the sources
A long introductory chapter on prephilosophical cosmogonies and cosmologies

What McKirahan has on KRS
It's more up to datevsthis was particularly obvious regarding Empedocles
Generally, where interpretations differed, I found McKirahan's preferable though again, I am no expert
The book continues into the Sophists and the nomos/phusis debate
Extended translations of Hippocratic texts and fragments from the Derveni papyrus I read this collection for Maxwell's History of Ancient Philosophy course during the second semester of/at Loyola University Chicago along with a similar collection edited and translated by, as I recall, Wainright.
Having read all the Presocratic fragments in several similar collections, it is difficult to remember the differences between them, In any case, on this occasion and for this course my primary interest was with Parmenides about whose Proem I composed the required term paper, Tratase de uma obra fabulosa, diria mesmo fundamental, para se conhecer o obscuro, mas interessantíssimo, mundo da filosofia présocrática, Repleto de citações originais e traduzidas, conjugase um texto muito completo, alicerçado em abundante bibliografia, que não se limita a dar a conhecer uma interpretação da história, mas aponta os vários caminhos relevantes de investigação sobre cada filósofo antigo.
My first philosophy text, where I learned Heraclitus only wrote in fragments, Very useful.
The presocratic philosophers are studied and commented with the invaluable help of most of their original texts,
I recommend it to anyone interested in Greek philosophy! Apart from a tortuously interminable introduction which traces, in excruciating detail, the prephilosophical beliefs which led to the emergence of more rational thinking among the ancient Greeks, this scholarly and thus exceedingly dry work is useful in providing insight into the foundations of Western thought.
And that's actually saying quite a bit,

It is in the fundamental, largely implicit i, e. , myopic dualism of ancient Greek thought that we find the seeds of every ill which Western European minds would inflict, and continue to inflict, upon the world, This is not to say that no good has come of Western philosophy, But just as the Greeks divided the universe into two diametric halves, so it is with the fruits of their labors: science has yielded both antibiotics and nuclear warfare, both the Internet and climate change.
Nor is the line between socalled Western and Eastern thought necessarily as crystalline as we sometimes choose to believe, Indeed, the influence of the East is acknowledged in this volume, both by the editors and in their sources, But it is clear the Western thought is pervaded by a dualism which Eastern thought more assiduously eschewed,

In short, the early Greeks were determined to break the world around us down into constituent units which could then, presumably, be used to explain all the phenomena which the world presents to us.
In this sense, the early rational thinkers were simply taking their mythologizing predecessors to the next level, What does emerge from the frankly tedious introductory material to this book is a clear picture of a people who were determined to understand the universe as a clockwork, presumably with the goal whether conscious or not of gaining some control over a mercurial world.
Even their prerational mythology largely sidesteps broader metaphysical questions of purpose, meaning, psychology, emotion, and so on, Holistic the Greeks were not, They sought for the sources of all things laughter, love, even thought itself in physical processes, and that's not funny at all,

Why this matters is that when we start to break the world down into components which are separate both from us and from one another, we leave the door open to a great many evils.
Nor is this to say that Eastern thought is some utopian panacea in this regard but that's a separate issue for another day, In the simplest, most obvious case, if you and I are distinct and separate entities, unconnected with one another in any fundamental way, one next logical step is for me to objectify you.
In fact, my world view has already done that for me, I simply need to pick up the ball and run with it, Before long your personhood means little or nothing to me, and I can easily justify, for example, oppressing you, dehumanizing you, even enslaving you, It is in the writings and thoughts of the Presocratic philosophers that we find the first evolution of this way of thinking from mere superstitious beliefs into an attempt at compelling and persuasive logical reasoning.
It is not too much to say that the Greeks, however unwittingly, laid the foundations for chattel slavery, exploitation of every description, totalitarianism, and, by extension, even the Holocaust,

As far as this volume itself, as a book to be read, is concerned, its scholarly approach is predictably dry and redundant, There is a relative dearth of simple paraphrase and practical examples, both of which would have vastly improved readability, and the typical scholarly impulse to split hairs ad nauseam often to little discernable reason is on full display.
Scholars love to fill pages, after all, But the scholarship here is, no doubt, scrupulous, and once you get past the mindnumbing introductory material, the main body of the text is clear enough, if somewhat arid and colorless.
It is certainly a good overview of Western philosophical thought before Socrates and his ilk took the reins, Un libro excelente que da una introducción a los filósofos presocráticos a través de una lectura de los fragmentos existentes de las obras de los diferentes pensadores.
Cada sección está dedicada a un filósofo y tiene una pequeña introducción que esta seguida por los diferentes fragmentos ordenados por temas, Esta forma de ordenar es bastante ventajosa en algunos casos ya que le brinda una estructura a los fragmentos, algo que para algunos pensadores es muy útil debido al poco material existente y a lo disperso del mismo.
La única posible crítica es que de alguna manera esta estructuración y, en algunos pensadores, la misma selección de fragmentos puede hacer demasiado guiado y rígida la interpretación, sin embargo los autores se preocupan por incluir comentarios sobre interpretaciones diferentes a las presentadas por ellos.
Más allá de esto, encuentro que este libro cumple una función esencial para el estudio de la filosofía presocrática en general y no he visto otro libro que haga un mejor trabajo que este para tal fin.
Here's a followup comment that I should probably lodge here, so it doesn't get completely lost:
sitelink goodreads. com/review/show/

This book is a disgrace, while Kirk was a competent scholar, his book on Heraclitus is quite good, though flawed, Raven was an idiot, . . and Schofield has here made an old book that at least was servicable almost worthless, They are completely unreliable guides to what the Presocratics, both individually and collectively are all about, Sorry to burst anyone's bubble,

Here's Kirk's book on Heraclitus:
sitelink amazon. com/HeraclitusCosm

Here's an example of the type of thing that J, E. Raven published
sitelink amazon. com/PythagoreansEl

In general, the Kirk half of KampR had more value than the Raven half but old' Schofield ruined both halves,

On the Presocratics, one simply has to study Cherniss' book, Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy which is quite difficult, and then study the relevant papers of William Arthur Heidel Heidel, Selected Papers.
And then read the specialized monographs on individual figures, Burnet's book, Early Greek Philosophy, is absolutely brilliant, but is completely wrong on almost everything but it is the sort of brilliance that makes it a book that is worth not just reading, but studying.
Guthrie's two volumes I amp II in his History of Greek Philosophy that are dedicated to the Presocratics are useful in that they summarize much bibliography and often states the status questionis of a problem in clear terms and they are very readable but Guthrie was himself a fool and missed a lot of what, after Cherniss and Heidel, should have been obvious.


One fabulous monograph that very few will have heard of is J, W. Beardslee's Physis which was a dissertation done under the supervision of Paul Shorey:
sitelink amazon. com/PhysisFifthCe

On Parmenides, you simply have to read and study and understand Tarán's book but that is very difficult if you don't have access to the Greek.
So, if you're interested in Parmenides and don't know Greek, try Kant, Or somebody like that .

It was okay, The majority of the book was Greek/Latin fragments with English translations accompanying them, followed by a lot of textual criticism/interpretations by scholars/etc, and then brief comments about the text,

It became very unreadable as time went on,
Read this and reviews of other classics in Western Philosophy on the History page of sitelinkwww, BestPhilosophyBooks. org a sitelink thinkPhilosophy Production,


Birthed in wonder, the Western tradition of Philosophy begins with these Presocratic philosophers of nature who were the first to ask: What are all existing things made of Is it one or many elemental substances Is there such a thing as nothingness or the void Is continual change the nature of reality, or are some things unchanging and eternal Experience the remaining fragments of their thinking in this classic text.



It all begins with a group of Presocratic before Socrates philosophers of nature who were the first to offer explanations for natural phenomena based on keen observation and reason, as opposed to myth or religion.
Kirk and Raven's Presocratic Philosophers is the gold standard introduction to this Presocratic era, and includes the remaining fragments of Thales and the Milesians, Empedocles, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Zeno, and the Atomists.


These natural philosophers begin with the question of what are things made out of, and each offers their own answer for the origin of what exists, For Thales, who observed that everything living needed water to survive, water was the primary substance, Empedocles was the first to name the four elements fire, air, water, and earth as the primary elements for all beings, moved by primal forces he named Love and Hate.
Parmenides and Heraclitus went back and forth about whether the underlying substrate was On or Many, creating the first full blown debate about what is called “the problem of the one and the many.
” From Zeno, we have a number of mathematical puzzles and thought experiments meant to support the idea of Parmenidean One by denying the existence of the void, Finally, the Atomists proposed the idea of even the elements being made up of invisible, indivisible, moving particles that they names atoms, an idea that remains a part of science even today.


This volume is a must have for the student of Ancient Greek Philosophy, This edition contains the fragments remaining from their written works in both the original Ancient Attic Greek and in translation its kinda cool to see the original Greek text!, plus commentary to help readers interpret and enjoy these earliest of natural philosophers.


Readers interested in the History of Western Science, Ontology popularly known as Metaphysics, and Epistemology will find some very interesting ideas here, which they can follow through into Aristotle's sitelinkPhysics and sitelinkMetaphysics.



Read this and reviews of other classics in Western Philosophy on the History page of sitelinkwww, BestPhilosophyBooks. org a sitelink thinkPhilosophy Production,
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