Greek cosmological models are grounded in an explicit concept of nature (phusis). Guiseppe Cambiano and Alexandra Lianeri).

This essay is the penultimate version of my contribution to The Edinburgh Critical History of Greek and Roman Philosophy (eds. To give an idea of how Empedocles articulates the elements of muthos and logos in his system, eleven fragments have been chosen in an attempt to illustrate the basic aspects of his system with an attention to mythical aspects: His imagination is constructive, gathering elements from every available quarter-Hesiodic and Ionian cosmogony, Parmenidean rationalism, Orphic mysticism, poetic legend, the experience of a physician, a poet’s sensuous response to the sights and sounds of mature, and the fears and hopes of a spirit exiled from heaven for ‘a brief span of life that is not life’- but building all these elements together into a unitary vision of the life of the world and the destiny of the human soul, bound, like the macrocosm, upon the wheel of birth and death (Cornford 122).

His work is a whole, in which religion, poetry, and philosophy are indissolubly united. With Empedocles, the qualities of a creative religious, mytho-poetic imagination fluent in Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Parmenides allies itself with a rational mind keenly interested in understanding the natural world.: The first condition for an understanding of Empedocles is to banish the notion of a gulf between religious beliefs and scientific views. The seeds of my later work on reflective self-consciousness and the origins of philosophy are already found here. Given the importance of allegoresis, that is, allegorizing as a conscious interpretative mode, it is most surprising that histories of ancient philosophy rarely mention the notion in the development of early Greek philosophy. In this essay, I examine the origins and development of this unremarked -albeit remarkable-“story.” I want to show to what degree the pre-Platoic project of philosophy was at time overshadowed by the allegorical approach to myth. This is due to the “spell” of myth, particularly Greek/Homeric myth, or to be more precise, because of the allegorical interpretation of Homeric myth. In fact, philosophia and muthologia are at times so intimately connected that, until the Enlightenment period, it is often difficult to distinguish between them. This “rational” approach invoked the same logos that is generally associated with philosophia.

They fought back with mutho-logia, that is, with a logos about myth. Much has been written on this famous transition, which many once considered as a “miracle.” However, there is little on how the proponents of myth responded.

The birth of philosophy is generally identified with the rejection of mythopoiesis and the adoption of rational explanations in terms of causality (e.g., Cornford, Guthrie, Vernant, Burkert, West, Curd, Laks, Long), whence the popular expression from muthos to logos or from myth to reason.

Sreten petrovic kulturologija pdf