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.

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."

Virtually every aspect of the modern Western worldview has its roots in the remarkably diverse body of philosophy that emerged from a small patch of land in the Mediterranean thousands of years ago. This volume offers an overview of the highlights of ancient Greek philosophy, as well as an historical account of the lives of many of the scholars and thinkers who helped shaped it.