The works of the early Greek philosophers are not only a fundamental source for understanding archaic Greek culture and the whole of ancient philosophy, but also a perennially fresh resource that has stimulated Western thought until the present day. This nine-volume edition presents all the major fragments from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC.

This volume presents six lively conversations with Hans-Georg Gadamer (born 1900), one of the twentieth century's master philosophers. Looking back over his life and thought, Gadamer takes up key issues in his philosophy, addresses points of controversy, and replies to his critics, including those who accuse him of having been in complicity with the Nazis. A genial and direct conversationalist, Gadamer is here captured at his best and most accessible. The interviews took place between 1989 and 1996, and all but (...) one appear in English for the first time in this volume. The first three conversations, conducted by Heidelberg philosopher Carsten Dutt, deal with hermeneutics, aesthetics, and practical philosophy and the question of ethics. In a fourth conversation, with University of Heidelberg classics professor Glenn W. Most, Gadamer argues for the vital importance of the Greeks for our contemporary thinking. In the next, the philosopher reaffirms his connection with phenomenology and clarifies his relation to Husserl and Heidegger in a conversation with London philosopher Alfons Grieder. In the final interview, with German Nazi expert Dörte von Westernhagen, Gadamer describes his life as a struggling young professor in Germany in the 1930s and refutes accusations of his complicity with the Nazis. These conversations are a lucid introduction for readers new to the philosopher's thought, and for experts they present an invaluable commentary on Gadamer's most important themes. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

This is the first book-length analysis of the techniques and procedures of ancient mathematical commentaries. It focuses on examples in Chinese, Sanskrit, Akkadian and Sumerian, and Ancient Greek, presenting the general issues by constant detailed reference to these commentaries, of which substantial extracts are included in the original languages and in translation, sometimes for the first time. This makes the issues accessible to readers without specialized training in mathematics or in the languages involved. The result is a much richer understanding (...) than was hitherto possible of the crucial role of commentaries in the history of mathematics in four different linguistic areas, of the nature of mathematical commentaries in general, of the contribution that the study of mathematical commentaries can make to the history of science and to the study of commentaries in general, and of the ways in which mathematical commentaries are like and unlike other kinds of commentaries. (shrink)

In this collection of richly documented case studies, experts in many textual traditions examine the ways in which important texts were preserved, explicated, corrected, and used for a variety of purposes. The authors describe the multiple ways in which scholars in different cultures have addressed some of the same tasks, revealing both radical differences and striking similarities in textual practices across space, time and linguistic borders. This volume shows how much is learned when historians of scholarship, like contemporary historians of (...) science, focus on earlier scholars' practices, and when Western scholarly traditions are treated as part of a much larger, cross-cultural inquiry. (shrink)

Shows how the classical tradition has shaped human endeavors, from art and government to mathematics and medicine.

L’auteur situe l’intérêt intense suscité par les Présocratiques en Allemagne dans les années 1920 dans le contexte de la philologie classique tout en le reconduisant au mouvement de fascination pour l’« archaïque » apparu au cours du dernier quart du xixe siècle. L’auteur montre que ce phénomène trouve sa source dans l’« invention » des Présocratiques par Nietzsche, au point que la réception des Présocratiques, notamment d’Héraclite, peut être considérée comme une réception déguisée de Nietzsche, ce qui éclaire d’un jour (...) nouveau l’invocation du « premier commencement » grec dans le Discours de rectorat de Heidegger.The author situates the interest in Pre-Socratic philosophy in Germany in the 1920s in regard to classical philology, linking this renewal to a fascination with the « archaic » that arose at the end of the 19th century. Critical here is the way this phenomena is rooted in a modern « invention » of Pre-Platonic thinkers through Nietzsche, one that culminates with figures such as Heraclitus functioning as a mask for Nietzsche reception, a philological and hermeneutical situation which illuminates the topic of the « first Greek beginning » in Heidegger’s Rectorial Address. (shrink)

According to the traditional interpretation of these celebrated lines, Pindar is saying here that while the wise can understand his poetry by themselves, the mass of his listeners need interpreters if they are to do so; he then goes on to contrast inferior poets, who can sing only ineffectually and only what they have learned, with the poet of natural genius, who surpasses them as the eagle surpasses the crows; and finally he returns to the subject at hand, the praise (...) of the victorious Theron of Acragas. Sandys' Loeb translation may be taken as a representative example: Full many a swift arrow have I beneath mine arm, within my quiver, many an arrow that is vocal to the wise; but for the crowd they need interpreters. The true poet is he who knoweth much by gift of nature, but they that have only learnt the lore of song, and are turbulent and intemperate of tongue, like a pair of crows, chatter in vain against the god—like bird of Zeus. Now, bend thy bow toward the mark! tell me, my soul, whom are we essaying to hit, while we now shoot forth our shafts of fame from the quiver of a friendly heart? Construed in this way, this passage has always been especially popular with scholars and with other readers — not surprisingly, for the former could find in it a justification for their activity as ρμηνες, while the latter could pride themselves on belonging to the συνετοί. (shrink)

The literary stock of Achilles Tatius has been increasing steadily in value since 1964, when an article about his romanceLeucippe and Cleitophonin an encyclopedia of world literature began, ‘Das Werk weist alle Mängel seines Genres samt einigen zusätzlichen eigenen auf.’ To be sure,Leucippe and Cleitophonremains among the last and probably least read of the Greek romances; yet in the last decades critics have begun to draw attention to original and effective aspects of its composition. As is usually the case, this (...) revaluation has been accompanied not so much by the discovery of new virtues which had previously been neglected, but rather by the redescription as virtues of what had always counted as vices. Thus Cleitophon's lack of heroism can now be welcomed as comic realism, the implausibly melodramatic twists of the plot praised as selfconsciously theatrical ironies, and the baroque frigidity of the style counted as loony metaphysical wit or as BrechtianEntfremdung seffekt. (shrink)