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The Pre-Socratic World-Picture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

W. K. C. Guthrie
W. K. C. Guthrie
Affiliation:
Peterhouse, Cambridge
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Extract

I recently became aware that I had for a long time entertained certain preconceptions about the way in which Presocratic thinkers saw the world, without ever having seriously considered the evidence on which my belief was based. This I have now tried to do, with the results which are set forth in this paper. Since in any case it will deal, in a fairly general way, with problems concerning the interaction of philosophical and religious thought in early Greece, I hope it will have a certain interest, whether or not its readers agree with the thesis put forward. The perennial fascination of that topic has been enhanced in recent years by the discussion provoked by Werner Jaeger's book on The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, from which I take this sentence as a kind of text for my own reflections: “Though philosophy means death to the old gods, it is itself religion.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , April 1952 , pp. 87 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1952

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References

1 This paper has been much improved as a result of discussions with Mr. G. S. Kirk, who must not, however, be thought to agree with every point made in it.

2 By ‘mystical’ in this context I mean that type of religion which envisages the possibility of a union, however achieved, between human and divine.

3 Phys. iii. 4. 203 b 13.

4 Fr. 2 DK.

5 Fr. 2 DK.

6 Fr. 5.

7 DK ii p. 56 1. 3.

8 For Linforth's view of this passage (Arts of Orpheus, University of California Press 1941, p. 147Google Scholar), see Guthrie, , The Greeks and their Gods (Methuen 1950) p. 311Google Scholar n. 3.

9 For the evidence on which this paragraph is based, see Guthrie, , Orpheus and Greek Religion (Methuen 1935) ch. vGoogle Scholar.

10 I.G. i. 442. If some think this is to read too much into the inscription, I can only state my own opinion, which is based on the general belief in the divinity of aither, on parallels like Eur. Hel. 1014 ff. (quoted below, p. 98), and on other considerations which find their place in my text. Their cumulative effect seems to me considerable.

11 Aristotle remarked (Diels-Kranz A 4, vol. i, p. 144, and note on p. 150) that the word ἀεὶ in this sentence might qualify either the preceding ἐóντoς or the following ἀξúνετoι. I am inclined to think that H. intended the former, but in any case the permanence of the λóγoς is sufficiently evident apart from this particular phrase.

12 Onians, R. B. (The Origins of European Thought, Cambridge 1951)Google Scholar has noted that in an age before writing has become familiar, speech and thought are naturally conceived materially, as composed of breath. He brings this idea into connection with Heraclitus's logos on p. 77, n. 9.

13 History of Sicily ii. 342.

14 This point is made by Dodds, E. R. in The Greeks and the Irrational (University of California Press 1951), pp. 152Google Scholar f.

15 29 e foll., 37 d.

16 Aristotle, Phys. iv. 6. 213 b 23.