Early Greek Thought

Before the Dawn

James Luchte

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780567353313
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441188892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient History

Early Greek Thought calls into question a longstanding mythology - operative in both the Analytic and Continental traditions - that the 'Pre-Socratics had the grandiose audacity to break with all traditional forms of knowledge' (Badiou). Each of the variants of this mythology is dismantled in an attempt to not only retrieve an 'indigenous' interpretation of early Greek thought, but also to expose the mythological character of our own contemporary meta-narratives regarding the 'origins' of 'Western', 'Occidental' philosophy. Using an original hermeneutical approach, James Luchte excavates the context of emergence of early Greek thought through an exploration of the mytho-poetic horizons of the archaic world, in relation to which, as Plato testifies, the Greeks were merely 'children'. Luchte discloses 'philosophy in the tragic age' as a creative response to a 'contestation' of mytho-poetic narratives and 'ways of being'. The tragic character of early Greek thought is unfolded through a cultivation of a conversation between its basic thinkers, one which would remain incomprehensible, with Bataille, in the 'absence of myth' and the exile of poetry.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Before the Dawn
• Acknowledgements
• Dating: A ‘Rough Sketch’
• Part One Meta-Philosophy of Early Greek Thought
• Chapter 1 The Motif of the Dawn, or on Gossip
• Chapter 2 The Dance of Being: Contexts of Emergence and Mytho–Poetic Horizons
• Chapter 3 ‘War is the Mother of all things’: Nietzsche and the Birth of Philosophy
• Chapter 4 Aletheia and Being – Heidegger contra Nietzsche
• Chapter 5 Philosophy as Tragedy (and Comedy) – A Note on Post-structuralism
• Part Two Tragic Thought
• Chapter 6 The Question of the First: Thales and Anaximander
• Chapter 7 Recoiling from the Abyss: Anaximenes and Xenophanes
• Chapter 8 ‘All is Flux’ – Heraclitus of Epheus (535–475 BC)
• Chapter 9 The Eternal Recurrence of the Soul: Pythagoras of Samos
• Chapter 10 Tragic Differing – Parmenides of Elea (Early Fifth Century)
• Chapter 11 Love, Strife and Mind – Empedocles and Anaxagoras
• Chapter 12 The Divine Beauty of Chaos – Democritus of Thrace (460–370 BC)
• Chapter 13 Plato in the Shadow of the Sublime
• Epilogue: Poetics and the Matheme – On Badiou’s Lacan
• Notes
• References and Further Reading
• Index