Christian Vassallo Books

The papyri transmit a part of the testimonia relevant to pre-Socratic philosophy. The ʼCorpus dei Papiri Filosofici‛ takes this material only partly into account. In this volume, a team of specialists discusses some of the most important papyrological texts that are major instruments for reconstructing pre-Socratic philosophy and doxography. Furthermore, these texts help to increase our knowledge of how pre-Socratic thought – through contributions to physics, cosmology, ethics, ontology, theology, anthropology, hermeneutics, and aesthetics – paved the way for the canonic scientific fields of European culture. More specifically, each paper tackles (published and unpublished) papyrological texts concerning the Orphics, the Milesians, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the early Atomists, and the Sophists. For the first time in the field of pre-Socratics studies, several papers are devoted to the Herculanean sources, along with others concerning the Graeco-Egyptian papyri and the Derveni Papyrus.

In the last few decades, scholarship’s interest in Presocratic philosophy has concentrated more and more on its reception in antiquity (and beyond). The present volume follows this research approach and attempts, thanks to the contributions of various scholars, to investigate some of the most significant topics in the field of Presocratic philosophy, poetry, and doxography. The title recalls Aristotle’s famous definition of Presocratics as φυσιολόγοι, but its content goes beyond questions strictly connected to the investigation of nature. For this reason, the volume is divided into two parts: the first part is properly devoted, on the one hand, to the doxographical and literary questions raised by the Presocratics, and, on the other, to their philosophical reception in antiquity; the second part explores the scientific and epistemological problems they tackle, with some additional references to the field of ethics.