The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy

Abstract

The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity. “This hauntingly beautiful study recovers the boundlessness of Presocratic thought. In close readings of five early Greek cosmologists, Victoria Wohl invites us to suspend our preconceptions about poetry and philosophy in order to unfold the poetics of their worldmaking projects.” — Brooke A. Holmes, Princeton University “At last, a comprehensive study of the Presocratics for the twenty-first century. The Presocratic philosophers have long been at once inviting and forbidding windows onto early Greek thought. Thanks to this book, their radically conceived projects are all the more irresistible and necessary today.” — James Porter, University of California, Berkeley