The best books on the beginnings of European theorizing

The Kirk and Raven translation of the Presocratic Philosophers was one of the first anthologies in English to cover the beginnings of speculation and philosophical discourse in early Greek culture. It essentially made the thought of the Presocratics available to me and, on a broader scale, to an English-speaking audience (drawing upon the German text of Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker and later editions edited by Walther Kranz (known to scholars as `Diels-Kranz’). While Kirk & Raven has been revised and edited by others it remains for me the first `path’ into ancient Greek thought (and thereby, to ways of thinking about the beginnings of theorizing and philosophy).

In terms of substance the work explores the transition from mythic traditions (Hesiod, Pherecydes, etc.) and Homeric poetry to the Ionian thinkers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus), the radical monistic ontology of the Italian Schools (Pythagoras, Alcmaeon, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, and so on), to the Post-Parmenidean systems of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, the Atomists, and Diogenes of Apollonia. This enabled readers to recover something of the vibrant culture and intellectual transformations of the sixth and fifth centuries in Greece and prepare for the great `revolution’ in reflection and self-reflection inaugurated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

As a student of both sociology and philosophy I was profoundly influenced by the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. One of these inspiring 'others’ was Hans-Georg Gadamer who promoted a radically interpretive or `hermeneutic’ approach to philosophical issues. While his major work is Truth and Method this collection of essays concerns itself with origins and 'beginnings,’ inviting readers to enter a dialogue with some of the key figures and problematics of Greek and thereby of Western European thought and culture. Plato was Gadamer’s great love and Gadamer rejects Heidegger’s reading of the Platonic Dialogues as the first phase of Western metaphysics and commends a reading of Platonic and Aristotelian thought as a spirited rejection of dogmatic thinking and a path toward a dialogical vision of thought and inquiry.

If Gadamer is an important guide to the hermeneutics of beginnings and the spirit of theorizing, Thomas Martin’s work is one of the most concise, readable, and comprehensive introductions to the social history of ancient Greece and the spiritual origins of Western culture. While there are many fine histories of the period, this book provides access to the whole sweep of Greek history from the beginnings of Hellenic civilization in Indo-European and Mycenaean cultures, to the Archaic age, the beginnings of democracy with the age of the city-state, the collapse of the Athenian Empire at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and the rise of Hellenistic Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms that led to the hegemony of Rome and Latin culture. The work is an exemplary form of what I would call 'configurational’ history as his narrative interweaves military, political, religious, and social history with detailed discussion of the realm of ideas and cultural movements. In short, the ideal text for a student new to the study of the ancient Greek world.   

Collins’ remarkable book is resolutely sociological and global. This path-breaking work formulates questions about the origins of thought and philosophical reflection in a comparative perspective. Avoiding traditional forms of Eurocentrism, Collins locates the Presocratic and Post-Socratic thinkers in social networks of groups and schools and the creative innovations of these schools are situated in a broader historical study of intellectual communities that include Ancient China, Ancient India, and Japan, and in a more recent context the interweaving constellations of Judaic, Christian, and Islamic thought. The work concludes with detailed analyses of the intellectual networks of early modern and modern philosophy (including the Vienna Circle, Analytic Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Phenomenology, Existentialism, and beyond). This work remains one of the great attempts of a social theorist to map the major currents of world thought and intellectual culture. The task first broached by Collins—to reconstruct the global social, political, military, and intellectual contexts of creative thought—continues to motivate and inform the work of significant intellectual figures to this day.

This early study of the young Nietzsche is probably the most personal choice as it returns me to an earlier self who first encountered Nietzsche as an undergraduate in the 1960s. In one sense this was my first introduction to what later became known as `Continental Philosophy’. But more than this, it demonstrated that there were fundamental issues and problems that were simply evaded and occluded by the standard histories of philosophy and European culture. The passion to return to the ancient world as a way of understanding the modern world has remain with me to the present. Nietzsche’s reflections on tragedy and `the tragic age’ struck me as a vital source of radical questions and pointed toward problems that remain with me to the present day: the Indo-European language roots of the first thinkers, the seminal role of Homer and Homeric poetry within the problematics of thought, the rejection of academic `Hellenism’ as a bloodless ideology, the place of tragedy in society and culture, the reflexive problem of how to critically recover these seeds of thought without simply repeating them or indulging in abstract exegesis, philology, and so on. For Nietzsche, the writings of the Presocratics represent the birth of transgressive philosophizing and `untimely’ thought that remains even more urgent in the present global age.