Xenophanes

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 much older than Miletus, and modern scholars in the positivist tradition painted these mystics and cult founders to look like themselves. Yet something really did change in the Greek texts, something that survives both Aristotle’s ancient attack on Heraclitus and its modern continuation in Barnes. This essay tries to say clearly what that something was.