[HN Gopher] The Presocratic Philosophers [pdf]
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       The Presocratic Philosophers [pdf]
        
       Author : andsoitis
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2023-02-18 12:42 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bard.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bard.edu)
        
       | jbaber wrote:
       | Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy without any gaps podcast
       | takes you from the pre-Socratics to... let's see, he's up to
       | Montaigne.
       | 
       | https://historyofphilosophy.net/
        
       | cf100clunk wrote:
       | I'll look through this (the Internet Archive's full version that
       | fero14041 mentioned) but Bertrand Russell's ''History of Western
       | Philosophy'' has always been a personal favourite overview,
       | covering this same topic and continuing to the late 19th
       | century's major philosophers.
        
         | hodgesrm wrote:
         | Bertrand Russell is great. He's an outstanding philosopher in
         | his own right and thus equipped to be a great interpreter of
         | others. If you tire of that there are always his tart opinions
         | on philosophers like Nietzche.
        
         | spindle wrote:
         | For people reading Russell: it's important to know in advance
         | that he's funny! I've known an expert (specifically, on Plato)
         | disparage Russell's history until I showed him which of his
         | sentences were jokes, and then they came around to my view that
         | his history is okay (although very condensed).
        
         | daseiner1 wrote:
         | should be noted that Russell's HoWP has some major
         | interpretative issues. Most notoriously he wrote prior to
         | Kaufmann's rehab of Nietzsche's image in the Anglosphere;
         | Russell interprets him entirely improperly.
        
         | mdp2021 wrote:
         | For convenience:
         | 
         | https://archive.org/details/TheHistoryOfWesternPhilosophy
        
         | davidhay wrote:
         | +1 for "History of Western Philosophy".
        
         | swatcoder wrote:
         | Nietszche was also a philologist first and foremost and wrote
         | extensively on the topic, albeit in his own irascible style
         | rather than the dry and paternal register of Russell and
         | similar.
         | 
         | Which is no accident in either case, as their rhetorical and
         | philosophical heritage trace precisely to the pre-Socratic and
         | Socratic traditions that they identify with.
        
       | endorphine wrote:
       | The reason Socrates is considered a point-in-time reference, is
       | because he was (supposedly) the first philosopher that was
       | thinking about how one should live (e.g. ethics) whereas before
       | him philosophers were concerned about what the world was made of.
        
         | endorphine wrote:
         | To clarify, Wikipedia[1] describes it better:
         | The term ["Presocratics"] was coined to highlight a fundamental
         | change in          philosophical inquiries between the
         | philosophers who lived          before Socrates, who were
         | interested in the structure of          nature and cosmos
         | (i.e., the universe, with the          implication that the
         | universe had order to it), and          Socrates and his
         | successors, who were mostly interested in          ethics and
         | politics. The term comes with drawbacks, as          several of
         | the pre-Socratics were highly interested in          ethics and
         | how to live the best life.
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-
         | Socratic_philosophy#Termin...
        
         | kar5pt wrote:
         | Also Plato is the earliest (Western) philosopher for whom we
         | have full dialogues. For most of the presocratics we only have
         | fragments of their works.
        
         | mdp2021 wrote:
         | > _ethics_
         | 
         | Well, the common stance before him would remain
         | 
         | "Investigate".
         | 
         | Already Thales is attributed the "Know thyself" (so we start
         | from the beginning); then one may think of Heraclitus (e.g.
         | "Evil witnesses are eyes and ears for men, if they have souls
         | that do not understand their language"). And of course,
         | Pythagoras - the studies "on good and evil" are reported by
         | Aristotle.
        
       | fero14041 wrote:
       | Caveat lector: This PDF version (from the 1962 ed.) misses
       | several pages and only contains some ~130 of the ~460 claimed
       | from the table of content.
       | 
       | For a complete book but from its 1957 ed., go eg. to the Internet
       | Archive: https://archive.org/details/presocraticphilo033229mbp
       | (PDF and EPUB available for download).
       | 
       | PS: This is not my knowledge domain, so above dates are retrieved
       | from theses PDF and related editions assumption is mine.
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-18 23:01 UTC)