The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance by André Laks (review)

Teaching an undergraduate course in ancient philosophy, one usually begins with “The Presocratics.” Students might well wonder who these mysterious folks are who seem to be saying some rather odd things while waiting for Socrates to show up and do some interesting philosophy. It is, of course, fairly easy to explain that “Presocratic” is a label that picks out a group of thinkers from the sixth and fifth centuries, and that one might more usefully use the term “Early Greek Philosophers.” Yet this doesn’t really deal with the difficulty, as André Laks argues in this short and intriguing volume that asks what we really mean when we use the terms “Presocratic” and “Philosophy.” Originally published as Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique” by Presses Universitaires de France in 2004, this slightly modified English version has been agreeably translated by Glenn W. Most.

In 1788, J.-A. Eberhard included a section on Presocratic Philosophy (“vorsokratische Philosophie”) in his history of philosophy; it became canonical among scholars when H. Diels published Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin 1903), which became the standard text for scholars (now H. Diels/W. Kranz). (This has now been replaced by the most welcome nine-volume Loeb Classical Library Early Greek Philosophy by Laks and Most—also published in French by Fayard.) Yet if “Presocratic” is a modern term, the notion that Socrates is quite different from Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and the others, is not. Laks names two strands of ancient discussion and commentary: the “Socratic-Ciceronian,” which sees a Socrates who “abandoned a philosophy of nature for the sake of a philosophy of man;” and the “Platonic-Aristotelian,” claiming that Socrates “passed from a philosophy of things to a philosophy of the concept” (1; italics in original). Laks raises questions about these. Once he has (in chapter 1) traced the pre-modern history of these traditions, he examines the presuppositions underlying the idea of Presocratic philosophy in (especially the European) nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship.

Chapter 2 explores the term “Presocratic” itself, noting the odd position that the Sophists have always been given in histories of ancient philosophy: many discuss human virtue and are contemporaries of Socrates; indeed why is Socrates not one of them, as Aristophanes claimed? The bulk of the chapter, focusing on the discipline of the history of philosophy, examines the emergence of the formal academic category of “Presocratic,” as several (primarily German) scholars opted for either the pre-Sophists (Hegel) or pre-Socrates (Zeller) as the demarcation; Nietzsche moved from “Preplatonic” to “Presocratic” as his choice. This emerging view suggested that the earliest Greek philosophical thinkers were merely forerunners, replaced by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Chapter 3 asks: In what sense are the Presocratics philosophers? In answering this, Laks examines the history of the Greek words philosophos and philosophia, considers the modern debates about myth and reason, and attempts to find (necessary and sufficient?) criteria for classifying an ancient thinker as a philosopher. He suggests two: first, an interest in totalities and generalities; second, the giving of arguments. This leads, in chapter 3, to an examination of rationality: Laks discusses various modern views about the thorny (and I suspect unanswerable) problem of “the emergence of rationality,” and the question of whether or not what the early Greek thinkers were doing was radically new. Chapter 4 worries about origins: in what sense can we find the origins of philosophy (and science) in early Greek philosophy; and what do such claims actually amount to? Laks makes characteristically modest but intelligent suggestions for understanding and perhaps beginning to solve these problems. Chapter 6 (“What is at Stake?”) compares the views of H.-G. Gadamer and E. Cassirer, showing that many of the same worries that appear in ancient philosophical historiography reappear in modern. Laks suggests that, finally, any sufficient analysis must get beyond worrying about the concept of Presocratic philosophy...