The Origins of Philosophy

Reading Group, Spring 2014

University of Chicago
Roger E. Eichorn


WHEN: Mondays, 3:004:30
WHERE: Stuart 209
WHY: Precisely



What is philosophy? The guiding thought behind this reading group is that one can
comprehensively (i.e., non-tendentiously) answer this constitutive question only by approaching
it historically. Whatever else philosophy may be, it is a way of thinking (or perhaps a family of
related ways of thinking) that emerged within the span of human history. In what did this
emergence consist? Do we owe philosophys existence to isolated, spontaneous leaps of genius,
or was its emergence bound up with broader sociocultural developments? Either way, what is it
that distinguishes philosophy from other, earlier modes of thought? To what extent is
philosophy continuous with, and to what extent is it discontinuous with, those earlier modes of
thought? Or perhaps the notion of such an emergenceof a transition from mythos to logosis
itself a myth, one whose truth, like that of all myths, lies not so much in its content as in the self-
understanding it engenders in those who propogate it. In grappling with these questions, the
hope is to achieve a clearer understanding of what we today are doingor what we think were
doingwhen we philosophize.



MEETING 1: 4/14 (Prephilosophical Thought)

1. Radin, Primitve Man as Philosopher (Chs 4, 5, 14)
2. Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Man (Ch. 12)

Optional
3. Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Man (Ch. 1)


MEETING 2: 4/21 (The Ionians and the Sophists)

1. Guthrie, The Early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Ch. 2)
2. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Chs. 1 & 3)

Primary Source
3. Waterfield (trans.), The First Philosophers


MEETING 3: 4/28 (Myth and Philosophy)

1. McLean & Aspel, Ancient Western Philosophy (Ch. 1)
2. Vamvacas, The Founders of Western Thought (Ch. 1)

Optional
3. Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (from Ch. 1)


MEETING 4: Wednesday, 5/07 (What Is Philosophy? What Is Myth?)

1. Lloyd, Disciplines In the Making (Ch. 1)
2. Buxton, Introduction to From Myth to Reason?


MEETING 5: 5/12 (Myth and Rationality)

1. Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Ch. 2)
2. Frede, Introduction to Rationality In Greek Thought


MEETING 6: 5/19

1. Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (Chs. 1718)


NO MEETING ON 5/26


MEETING 7: 6/2 (Mythical and Philosophical Reflexivity)

1. Sandywell, The Beginnings of European Theorizing (from Ch. 1)
2. Sandywell, Presocratic Reflexivity (from Ch. 1)