Early Greek Thought

Informed by a hermeneutic perspective, this title presents a survey of the Pre-Socratic thinkers, the contexts from which they emerged and their influence. It calls into question a longstanding mythology that the 'Pre-Socratics had the grandiose audacity to break with all traditional forms of knowledge' (Badiou). Early Greek Thought calls into question a longstanding mythology - operative in both the Analytic and Continental traditions - that the Pre-Socratics had the grandiose audacity to break with all traditional forms of knowledge (Badiou). Each of the variants of this mythology will be dismantled in an attempt to not only retrieve an indigenous interpretation of early Greek thought, but also to expose the mythological character of our own contemporary meta-narratives regarding the origins of Western, Occidental philosophy. Using an original hermeneutical approach, Luchte excavates the context of emergence of early Greek thought through an exploration of the mytho-poetic horizons of the archaic world, in relation to which, as Plato testifies, the Greeks were merely children. Luchte discloses philosophy in the tragic age as a creative response to a contestation of mytho-poetic narratives and ways of being. The tragic character of early Greek thought will be unfolded through a cultivation of a conversation between its basic thinkers, one which would remain incomprehensible, with Bataille, in the absence of myth and the exile of poetry.