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Available From UC Press
The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
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.
"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