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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Approaching the Presocratics from a Different Angle, March 24, 2005
This review is from: Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Paperback)
General Review of Book Series: I have to admit it: I am a fan of these little books. It's my dirty little secret. These short introductions provide one with a pocketsize, portable introduction to a wide variety of topics. With a light tone and a surface skim of the issues, these little guides provide one with the general overview one might expect in a small survey course. Naturally, there are downsides. Are these guides comprehensive? Heavens no! Do they take time to dig deeply into the issues? Not generally. But are they a good resource to use if you want to get your feet wet before you dive in? Yes. When used properly, these little guidebooks can allow what might start out as a casual curiosity to develop into a more in-depth research project. In fact, all of these introductions provide references and suggestions for further reading. Catherine Osborne's _A Very Short Introduction to Presocratic Philosophy_ is another work, like Julia Annas's _Very Short Introduction to Ancient Philosophy_, that examines its subject matter topically rather than through a chronological account of the various thinkers who fall under this category. Osborne manages to pull it off splendidly, while still providing enough of a timeline in order to develop a sense for the history. Readers who were looking more for "thought summaries" in Annas's work will find it in this introduction, as her focused topic allows for this sort of interpretation. Osborne's first chapter is dedicated to the process of finding fragmentary evidence and how it is assembled and interpreted by scholars. I found this chapter particularly helpful, especially since it manages to communicate the difficulties that surround Presocratic scholarship. Chapter two addresses what might be called the main thesis of her entire introduction. For a long time now, scholars have organized Presocratic thinkers into a timeline according to Aristotle's observation that they were all striving after first principles (early attempts at cosmology) until Parmenides. However, if we follow this line of reasoning, we become locked into only examining certain thinkers and dismissing much of what they have to say regarding their other philosophical interests. Thus, Osborne vows to chuck the "first principles story" out the window and to examine what other stories are lurking in the fragments of these ancient thinkers. What follows are a series of topically based chapters, each essentially covering the diverse thought of various thinkers: Zeno; the examination of reality and appearance through Xenophanes, Melissus, and Anaxagoras; Heraclitus; Pythagora; and finally the sophists Protagoras and Gorgias. Osborne's writing is clear and she manages to provide engaging summaries of these thinkers and the wide range of their thought. Additionally, she has provided an excellent bibliography for anyone interested in following up on any one of these topics or thinkers. If you have an interest in Presocratic philosophy, or just want a refresher on what these thinkers had to say, you've come to the right place.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A thought-provoking introduction to the Presocratics, August 28, 2005
This review is from: Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Paperback)
If you want to understand the origins of Western thought, whether science, philosophy or theology, then you must start with the Presocratics. Something very remarkable happened in the Greek world 2,600 years ago; the emergence of speculative intellectual enquiry and reasoned argument. Catherine Osborne provides a readable and lively introduction to these pioneer thinkers. She starts with an account of a discovery of a fragment written by Empedocles, to give the reader an insight into how scholars investigate these early philosophers and the difficulties they face interpreting such scant evidence. Then she proceeds to specific, selected topics and thinkers. So it is not a conventional, chronological account, although she incidentally provides that along the way. To this end, the map, timeline and pronunciation guide at the beginning of the book are extremely useful. If you want a more conventional - and more thorough - introduction, then try Early Greek Philosophy, by J Barnes. Osborne's tone is occasionally very didactic, and she will sometimes ask a question and leave the reader to think of an answer, so that it feels very much like being in class. Her account of the Sophists is rather partisan (she doesn't seem to like them very much) and the reader should take it as a point of view rather than the last word. But overall, this is a great book, with an informative text and well-chosen illustrations. For many readers, this short account will tell them all they want to know about the beginnings of the Western intellectual tradition. Your next step is Plato and Aristotle.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Missing the point of a Very Short Introduction., March 26, 2011
This review is from: Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Paperback)
Differently than other Very Short Introductions (VSI) by Oxford Press, this one on presocratic philosophy by Catherine Osborne, a professor of ancient philosophy at the University of East Anglia, clearly demonstrates that "short" does not always mean "easy". On the contrary, the more the information that must be squeezed into a given small format (such as the VSI's 160 pages), the more difficult this endeavour becomes for both the author and the reader. In the present case, the result swings between inconsistency and superficiality. Given the subject of this book, Osborne faced a titanic challenge, namely that of summarizing two of the most innovative centuries of the history of thought, with nothing more than fragmentary sources at hand. But instead of humbly recognizing the difficulty of this task, for example by limiting the scope of the book to the essential aspects of the philosophical debate of that time as discussed by different thinkers, Osborne chooses a conventional chronological approach and tries to handle the complete philosophy systems of Empedocles, Parmenides, Heraclitus, etc., in dedicated chapters. This may work fine in a conventionally long volume but not within the claustrophobic constraints of a VSI. To make things worse, there are unbalances like the unexpectedly lenghty detours in which Osborne gets trapped on and off. One of these is the verbous discussion at the beginning of Chapter 2 about what she calls "the story", meaning a main-stream taxonomy of presocratic philosophers according to which Parmenides would have been arbitrarily made a successor of Heraclitus to present the philosophy of the former as a superior solution to weak points of the latter, in the name of monadic unity. Maybe she has a point but then why does she conclude Chapter 5 about Heraclitus by saying: "Perhaps Heraclitus lived before Parmenides, perhaps he lived after, perhaps he lived at the same time". If she has no evidence to support one or the other hypothesis then what is the value of the polemic in Chapter 2? But Osborne's biggest methodological blunder in this short text has probably to do with her decision to paste translations of Empedocles', Parmenides' and Heraclitus' fragments in it and then try to reconstruct the philosophies of those thinkers via a bottom-up approach. This is definitely not possible in just few pages. Instead, it would require entire volumes to address all translation questions and interpretation problems that such cryptic, incomplete and ancient texts bring with them. The paradox of this very short volume is that, instead of allowing the readers to save time, it forces them to look for other books to fill the gaps contained in this one. Not exactly the marketing idea behind the VSI series.
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