Hesiod and the Beginnings of Greek Philosophy

What is the role of Hesiod’s poetry in the beginnings of Greek philosophy? This book explores the question by going beyond the traditional responses that stress either continuities or discontinuities between myth and philosophy. Instead, this volume attempts a reflexive or response-oriented approach, that highlights the active re-appropriation and renewal of Hesiodic thought by the Presocratic philosophers. Its fifteen contributions offer large scale comparisons, historiographical considerations, thematic and generic approaches, and detailed case studies.

Leopoldo Iribarren, Ph.D (2009), EHESS, is Associate Professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). He has published monographs, translations and articles on early Greek thought and modern philosophy. His most recent book is Fabriquer le monde: technique et cosmogonie dans la poésie grecque archaïque (Classiques Garnier, 2018).
Hugo Koning, Ph.D. (2010), Leiden University, is a teacher of Greek at Leiden University. He publishes on Hesiod, reception studies and mythology. He is the author of Hesiod: The Other Poet. Ancient Reception of a Cultural Icon (Brill, 2010).
Contributors are: Ilaria Andolfi, Xavier Gheerbrant, Richard Hunter, Pierre Judet de La Combe, André Laks, Tom Mackenzie, Kathryn Morgan , Glenn W. Most, Valeria Piano, Marco Antonio Santamaría, Sandra Šćepanović, Stephen Scully, Jenny Strauss Clay, Shaul Tor, Athanassios Vergados.

"The collection is a very fine exception to the tendency of conference volumes to be frustrating to read straight through even when individual papers are excellent. (...) the volume is coherent not only in its overall topic but in aspects of its approach to the question of how we should locate Hesiod in relation to the Presocratics. It moves away from the traditional formulation of a transition from mythos to logos and from the relatively crude question of whether we should emphasize that Hesiod composed mythical genealogies and so belongs to a pre-rational strain of thought or instead that he creates a totalizing system that anticipates later efforts to comprehend the whole of nature. Instead, it tries both to rethink the questions and to examine particular ways that later thinkers engaged with Hesiod.(...)
Iribarren and Koning’s unusually thoughtful and helpful introduction summarizes the modern history of scholarship on Hesiod and the Presocratics. It contextualizes the fifteen papers that follow, providing a richer and more useful account of how this volume functions in relation to earlier discussions than this review possibly can."
Ruth Scodell in BMCR 2023.02.17