Home Classical, Ancient Near Eastern & Egyptian Studies The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy
book: The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy
Book Open Access

The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy

  • Victoria Wohl
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025
View content
View more publications by University of California Press
To Publisher Page

About this book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus.
 
Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity.
 

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Victoria Wohl Victoria Wohl is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and author of Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens, Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory, and Euripides and the Politics of Form.

Topics

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 26, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780520413337
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
252
https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520413337
eBook ISBN: 9780520413337
Keywords for this book
Presocratic philosophy; ancient Greek thought; early metaphysics; philosophical poetry; Heraclitus fragments; Parmenides logic; Empedocles cosmology; Anaxagoras theory; Democritus atomism; literary philosophy; poetic reasoning; philosophy and language; ancient epistemology
Creative Commons
BY 4.0
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2026 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 3.3.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520413337/html
Scroll to top button