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

Victoria Wohl

Univ of California Press, Aug 27, 2025 - Literary Criticism - 252 pages

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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.
 

Contents

• The Poetry of Being: 1
• Parmenidess Logos of Being: 21
• Time the Cosmos and the Soul in Heraclitus: 56
• Empedocless Autobiography: 89
• Anaxagoras and the Things: 124
• Democritus and the Poetics of Nothing: 158
• The Prose of the World: 191
• Bibliography: 199
• Index: 225

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy; Volume 78 of Sather Classical Lectures, ISSN 0080-6684
• Author: Victoria Wohl
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Univ of California Press, 2025
• ISBN: 0520422643, 9780520422643
• Length: 252 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical; Philosophy / Aesthetics; Philosophy / Epistemology; Philosophy / General; Philosophy / History & Surveys / Ancient & Classical; Philosophy / Metaphysics