Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Theoretical issues
- 3 Some Presocratics
- 4 The sophists and their contemporaries
- 5 The Protagoras: Platonic myth in the making
- 6 The range of Platonic myth
- 7 Plato: myth and the soul
- 8 Plato: myth and theory
- 9 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
2 - Theoretical issues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Theoretical issues
- 3 Some Presocratics
- 4 The sophists and their contemporaries
- 5 The Protagoras: Platonic myth in the making
- 6 The range of Platonic myth
- 7 Plato: myth and the soul
- 8 Plato: myth and theory
- 9 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
Summary
Specifying the function of myth in early Greek philosophy is a perilous enterprise. What is myth? What is philosophy? How can we recognise philosophical myth? These categories are retrospective impositions on the competitive intellectual world of the sixth to fourth centuries bc. In order to define terms, we must realise that several interpretative problems overlap. First and most basic, there is a problem concerning what we mean and what the Greeks meant, when they used the word ‘myth’ (mythos). Second, there are problems concerning what conditions helped to bring about the rise of what we call philosophy, and the nature of the intellectual project involved. Third, we must investigate what moves are involved in the representation of the rise of philosophy, and how philosophy is related to the larger worlds of poetic discourse and mythology. This last set of questions is crucial because the formation of a specifically philosophical mythology is a result of the conceptual exclusion of poetic mythological discourse by early philosophers. This exclusion has influenced subsequent generations and has led to modern misconceptions of the relationship between philosophy and myth in ancient philosophical authors. Since early philosophers reject poetic claims to seriousness, we have often assumed that mythological elements within philosophy are ornamental bows in the direction of an obsolete thought world. We ignore the possibility that myth may serve a philosophical purpose.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato , pp. 15 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000