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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.

About the Author

Victoria Wohl is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and author of Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens, Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory, and Euripides and the Politics of Form.

Reviews

“This hauntingly beautiful study recovers the boundlessness of Presocratic thought. In close readings of five early Greek cosmologists—Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus—Victoria Wohl invites us to suspend our preconceptions about poetry and philosophy in order to unfold the poetics of their worldmaking projects. She makes a powerful case for tarrying with the language of these thinkers not as a vehicle for transcendence but as a mode of thinking in the thick of things."—Brooke A. Holmes, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics, Princeton University

"At last, a comprehensive study of the Presocratics for the twenty-first century. Abstract painters in a concrete medium who explored the world through the cracks between Being and language, 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, Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Irving Stone Chair in Literature, University of California, Berkeley