Abstract

Since Bernal's Black Athena, there has been a tendency to shy away from declarations claiming that something radical occurred in ancient Greece. This reluctance has been coupled with a denial that there is any differentiating quality to the western world at all. It is the contention of The Project of Philosophy that, given the dominance of the west in the present process of globalisation, these responses prevent understanding. ;The Project of Philosophy, then, is an attempt to rethink the nature of the west through a consideration of the rise of philosophy in Greece with a recognition that this needs to be justified. The essay argues that it is in the exclusion of myth from the philosophers' city, as evidenced in Plato's Republic, that the source of the distinctive qualities of the west can be found. In differentiating philosophy from poetry, Plato brings into being the specifically western mode of thought and experience. With Plato we have evidence of the first fully delineated object and a representation of experience as motivated by objects. Unlike previous attempts to think the nature of philosophy, this argument does not presuppose the philosophical or scientific object, but rather recognises that the object is itself a cultural product. ;The Project of Philosophy engages with a number of philosophical theories of myth and with the problem of the relation between myth and philosophy in order to reveal the presumptiousness of the philosophical description of the nature of thought. The essay does not generate a theory of myth, rather it asks how the ambiguity, the contradictions, projections and presuppositions evidenced in philosophical theories of myth are possible given philosophy's understanding of the distinction between myth and philosophy. ;Finally, the essay gives an account of how the object came into being, and suggests ways in which the process through which the object is discovered parallels the simultaneous development of politics in ancient Greece. These considerations lead to some concluding remarks concerning the dominance of the object in western thought and culture and the continuing legacy of ancient Greece