Ancient Greek thought is the essential wellspring from which the intellectual, ethical, and political civilization of the West draws and to which, even today, we repeatedly return. In more than sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this volume explores the full breadth and reach of Greek thought--investigating what the Greeks knew as well as what they thought about what they knew, and what they believed, invented, and understood about the conditions and possibilities of knowing. Calling attention to the characteristic reflexivity of Greek thought, the analysis in this book reminds us of what our own reflections owe to theirs.

In sections devoted to philosophy, politics, the pursuit of knowledge, major thinkers, and schools of thought, this work shows us the Greeks looking at themselves, establishing the terms for understanding life, language, production, and action. The authors evoke not history, but the stories the Greeks told themselves about history; not their poetry, but their poetics; not their speeches, but their rhetoric. Essays that survey political, scientific, and philosophical ideas, such as those on Utopia and the Critique of Politics, Observation and Research, and Ethics; others on specific fields from Astronomy and History to Mathematics and Medicine; new perspectives on major figures, from Anaxagoras to Zeno of Elea; studies of core traditions from the Milesians to the various versions of Platonism: together these offer a sense of the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that marked Greek civilization--and that Aristotle considered a natural and universal trait of humankind. With thirty-two pages of color illustrations, this work conveys the splendor and vitality of the Greek intellectual adventure.

Plato’s unusual combination of argumentative and creative talents complicates any interpretative approach to his work, as does his choice of Socrates as a major figure. In recent years, scholars have looked more closely at the philosophical importance of the imaginative and literary aspects of Plato’s writing, and have begun to appreciate the methods of the ancient philosophers and commentators who studied Plato and their attitudes to Plato’s appropriation of Socrates.

This study brings together leading philosophical and literary scholars who investigate these new–old approaches and their significance in distancing us from the standard ways of reading Plato. Confronting the standard modern readings more directly, this work attempts to present the outcomes of these investigations to readers in a way that will encourage further exploration and innovative engagement.