Parmenides

Mythos and Logos: What Was Genuinely New in the Presocratics

People often call the Presocratics the first masters of reason. That gives them too much credit and misunderstands them at the same time. Careful thinking is far older than Miletus, and the cool logicians of the modern portrait were in fact poets, healers, and cult founders, as E. R. Dodds showed in The Greeks and the Irrational. Yet something really did change in the Greek texts, something that survives Aristotle’s attack on Heraclitus and its modern echo. This essay tries to say clearly what that something was.