Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford Scholarly Classics) [Hardcover]

M. L. West (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0198142897 | ISBN-13: 978-0198142898 | Publication Date: August 2, 2001

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, M. L. West is formerly Professor of Greek at the Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 284 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198142897
• ISBN-13: 978-0198142898
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,498,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic for good reason., July 4, 2008

By 

Nicolas E. Leon Ruiz (Cleveland, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford Scholarly Classics) (Hardcover)

A brilliant and lucidly argued case for the influence of Asian thought and religion on Greek philosophy. Written in 1971, this book prepared the ground for subsequent studies of the relationships between ancient Greece and her neighbors.

West's skill and sensitivity as a translator and interpreter is impressive, his command of such a variety of ancient languages and texts just plain intimidating. But he writes clearly and makes his points in a way accessible to students and non-specialists (though there is a fair amount of untranslated Greek, as was the custom a few decades ago).

Anyone interested in Presocratic philosophy needs to read this book--and not just for West's arguments for eastern influence, but also for his valuable and intelligent commentary on the texts themselves. West's study will also be of great interest to students of ancient cultural exchange and the history of ideas and religion.

It seems odd to me that some find fault with this book for the spirit and execution of its daring and groundbreaking explorations. West is anything but pedantic and anything but careless. Indeed, he is a fine example of that rarest of birds: the masterful scholar who is also a creative thinker.

His book was written at a time when many in academe still held to a fiction of ancient Greece as a self-created world sealed off from "foreign" influences. Perhaps a final relic of the colonial mentality, who knows, but something that had to be demolished. West's book was badly needed--a breath of fresh air and a foundation for much important work in the years to come. Its staying power is testament to the quality of his work. The fact that it's still an exciting and powerful read is testament to his genius. To paraphrase Heraclitus: One scholar is worth ten thousand to me, if he's the best.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant book that changes your paradigms in philosophy, October 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford Scholarly Classics) (Hardcover)

The book is put together most wonderfully using ample references to original text. The idea is not a new one. Greek philosphy derived many if not most of its early ideas from what are today loosely grouped together as Zoroastrian philosophies. Anyone familiar with both systems of philosophy would appreciate the depth of insight and the thoroughness of it references (mostly in Greek). I recomend this to all serious history and philosophy buffs.

9 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars West's fantasy, August 5, 2006

By 

Demetrios Vakras (Melbourne Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford Scholarly Classics) (Hardcover)

Anyone reading Hesiod and encountering Typhon should automatically recognise who, or rather what, Typhon is: the volcano at Thera which erupted in the 17th century BC. M. L. West fails to understand the history behind the tale. He has no understanding that the Hurrian tales which tell the same story, but with differing interpretations of the phenomena, were not the source of Greek myths, but independent observations of the same phenomena which both Greeks and Hurrians made, and what was assumed by both to be divine forces battling over the control of the underworld and the heavens. Additionally, the Hittites had their own take on this event, which was accompanied with a series of "missing god" myths intended on insuring the fertility of their crops which had failed as a consequence of the post-eruption volcanic winter. That these tales travelled, via the Mittani to India, & Typhon came to be Vritra should be what West should have pursued. Ideas travelled from the Aegean to India, and not, as West claims, from east to west.

(The best exposition on the interpretation of mythological tales can be found in de Santillana's and von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth; along with William Sullivan's The Secret of the Incas The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time in which Sullivan applies von Dechend's and de Sanitllana's approach to mythologies with stunning results.)

West betrays an obvious agenda: that being, that he wishes to attribute to the Near East the origin of religious "wisdom" and therefore of his own Christian faith. That West's proposition lies outside the realm of logic is conceded by him in other works of his. In his introduction to his translation of Hesiod's Theogony (an OUP "world classics" paperback. pp. xvi-xvii) West writes, for instance, that the origins of Greek ideas derive from the Levant, and, although "Jewish, Persian, Indian...[tales,] are later than Hesiod, it is true... there can hardly be any question of his having influenced them." So, according to West, the Greeks derived their tales from people who recorded them centuries after the Greeks recorded their own. Other claims by West are just as skewed. One of these is in the dating of the Mesopotamian epic, the so-called "Epic Of Creation" (alternately known as the "Enuma Elis"). This he dates to the 11th Century BC. The oldest tablets ever found, as conceded by other authorities such as Stephanie Dalley (also in the OUP stable) in her Myths from Mesopotamia, date them to around the 8th century BC (though she too claims that the tale itself must be earlier although there is no proof of its existence before this time). These tablets are therefore nearly contemporaneous with Hesiod's Theogony. Sycophants of West (which include among them Dalley and George Roux) argue that the absence of evidence of this epic's existence before the 8th century is no evidence that it did not exist before then. That then begs the question of why it is only to the Near East, to the exclusion of other regions, that this reasoning is applied? Surely if it is applied to the Near East and India it can be applied to the Greeks as well? The answer as becomes evident is that it does not suite the conclusion that West has already reached. An a priori conclusion guides such selective and sloppy reasoning.

The problem with ML West is that he is a translator of ancient Greek who imagines his abilities are greater than they actually are. That anyone takes him seriously in academia should be a great cause of concern. That academia accepts an argument solely on the authority of the person who makes it and not on the strength of the logic of its own argument is a greater concern.