
Pre-Socratics: A Painless Introduction - Tomte
http://lukemuehlhauser.com/pre-socratics-a-painless-introduction/
======
drieddust
Those who are interested in Philosophy should also look at Indian Philosophy.
India has a rich and unbroken philosophical tradition pre-dating Greeks. This
Podcast by LMU in Munich and at King's College London covers Indian Philosoply
in great details.

[1]
[http://historyofphilosophy.net/india](http://historyofphilosophy.net/india)

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CalChris
Well, my favorite pre-Socratic is the sophist, Gorgias and in particular his
Encomium of Helen.

[http://myweb.fsu.edu/jjm09f/RhetoricSpring2012/Gorgias%20Enc...](http://myweb.fsu.edu/jjm09f/RhetoricSpring2012/Gorgias%20Encomium%20of%20Helen.pdf)

We don't have much from the pre-Socratics. We have Plato. History is selective
that way.

~~~
pmoriarty
Mine is Heraclitus, "the weeping philosopher". All we have of his writings are
fragments, my favorite being:

    
    
      He who hears not me but the Logos will say: All is one.
    

I have hope that with new archaeological discoveries, and with new technology
being used to recover old, formerly unreadable documents like burnt paper
which can now be read, that there will be more writings of the Pre-Socratics
available for us to read in the future.

~~~
chongli
A mention of Heraclitus is not complete without also mentioning Parmenides[0].
Together, these two are the champions of their respective sides in the
millennia old _Being vs Becoming_ [1] debate. _Being_ took a few blows at the
hands of modern philosophers but I think there's plenty of room to explore the
idea in the contemporary setting. The ideas we have access to now concerning
relativity, quantum mechanics, space-time, and the holographic universe make
it fun to explore Parmenides's idea of a static, unchanging reality that we
are only able to perceive in a limited way due to our fundamental limitations
as finite humans.

As a side note, I find it amusing how closely this debate parallels one of our
own debates in the programming community: functional vs imperative
programming.

[0]
[http://seop.illc.uva.nl/entries/parmenides/](http://seop.illc.uva.nl/entries/parmenides/)

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_(philosophy)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_\(philosophy\))

~~~
vidarh
To drag this debate down, I find it interesting that in the Marvel universe
you could have put "a static, unchanging reality that we are only able to
perceive in a limited way due to our fundamental limitations as finite humans"
into the mouth of Doctor Doom word for word and it would fit right in ("Books
of Doom" has him saying pretty much exactly that to his physics teacher as a
teen), perhaps with a few minor changes ("our" to "your", probably, as the
character would not want to include himself amongst mere "finite humans").

When the right writers get hold of one of the more interesting characters,
there's a surprising amount of nods to philosophy to be found.

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roryrjb
The article already mentions it but I highly recommend "The History of Western
Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, if you are interested in any type of
philosophy or philosophers. It gives a good overview from the pre-Socratics up
until the beginning of the 20th Century.

~~~
barry-cotter
From the author's _Best Textbooks On Every Subject_

Subject: History of Western Philosophy

Recommendation: The Great Conversation, 6th edition, by Norman Melchert

Reason: The most popular history of western philosophy is Bertrand Russell's A
History of Western Philosophy, which is exciting but also polemical and
inaccurate. More accurate but dry and dull is Frederick Copelston's 11-volume
A History of Philosophy. Anthony Kenny's recent 4-volume history, collected
into one book as A New History of Western Philosophy, is both exciting and
accurate, but perhaps too long (1000 pages) and technical for a first read on
the history of philosophy. Melchert's textbook, The Great Conversation, is
accurate but also the easiest to read, and has the clearest explanations of
the important positions and debates, though of course it has its weaknesses
(it spends too many pages on ancient Greek mythology but barely mentions
Gottlob Frege, the father of analytic philosophy and of the philosophy of
language). Melchert's history is also the only one to seriously cover the
dominant mode of Anglophone philosophy done today: naturalism (what Melchert
calls "physical realism"). Be sure to get the 6th edition, which has major
improvements over the 5th edition.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subj...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/)

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propertius
"Kirk and Raven" is the standard textbook in English. Gives and discusses the
principal testimonia and fragments in the original Greek (or Latin) with
English translations.

As it happens, there's a pdf of an early edition (1957) here:
[https://archive.org/stream/presocraticphilo033229mbp](https://archive.org/stream/presocraticphilo033229mbp)

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seesomesense
"Ephesians be rich. There is no greater curse" Heraclitus

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XaYdEk
Will use this as a referencem good article.

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mwfogleman
Wonder why Luke Muehlhauser is interested.

