Jean-Pierre Vernant's concise, brilliant essay on the origins of Greek thought relates the cultural achievement of the ancient Greeks to their physical and social environment and shows that what they believed in was inseparable from the way they lived. The emergence of rational thought, Vernant claims, is closely linked to the advent of the open-air politics that characterized life in the Greek polis. Vernant points out that when the focus of Mycenaean society gave way to the agora, the change had profound social and cultural implications. "Social experience could become the object of pragmatic thought for the Greeks," he writes, "because in the city-state it lent itself to public debate. The decline of myth dates from the day the first sages brought human order under discussion and sought to define it.... Thus evolved a strictly political thought, separate from religion, with its own vocabulary, concepts, principles, and theoretical aims."

In more than 60 essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought, investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the possibilities of knowing. 65 color illustrations. Maps.

Important study focuses on the revival and assimilation of ancient Greek mathematics in the 13th-16th centuries, via Arabic science, and the 16th-century development of symbolic algebra. 1968 edition. Bibliography.

Aimed at students of classics and of philosophy who would like a taste of the subject before being committed to a full course and at those who have already started and need to find their bearings in what may seem at first a complex maze of names and schools, "Introducing Greek Philosophy" is a concise, lively, philosophically aware introduction to ancient Greek philosophy. The book begins with the Milesians in Asia Minor before moving over to the developments in the western Greek world, then focusing on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Athens, finishing with the Hellenistic schools and their arrival in Rome, where the main ideas are set out in the Latin poetry of Lucretius and the prose of Cicero.The book eschews the method of most histories of ancient philosophy of addressing one thinker after another through the centuries. Instead, after a basic mapping of the territory, it takes the great themes that the Greeks were engaged in from the earliest times, and looks at them individually, their development in argument and counter-argument, from the beginnings of recorded Greek history, through the various upheavals of tyrannies, democracies, oligarchies and kingships, to their introduction into Rome in the first century BC.

The most striking merits of Guthrie's work are his mastery of a tremendous range of ancient literature and modern scholarship.

Jack Connor concise, brilliant essay on the origins of Greek thought relates the cultural achievement of the ancient Greeks to their physical and social environment and shows that what they believed in was inseparable from the way they lived. The emergence of rational thought, Jack Connor claims, is closely linked to the advent of the open-air politics that characterized life in the Greek polis. Connor points out that when the focus of Mycenaean society gave way to the agora, the change had profound social and cultural implications. "Social experience could become the object of pragmatic thought for the Greeks," he writes, "because in the city-state it lent itself to public debate. The decline of myth dates from the day the first sages brought human order under discussion and sought to define it. Thus evolved a strictly political thought, separate from religion, with its own vocabulary, concepts, principles, and theoretical aims."