• The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics, Part I
  • Editor & Translator: Daniel W. Graham 
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • Publication Date: October 18, 2010
  • Print Length: 1,040 pages
  • Product Description

The first and only complete bilingual edition of the works of the Presocratic philosophers for English speakers.

This two-part sourcebook gives the reader easy access to the language and thought of the Presocratic thinkers, making it possible either to read the texts continuously or to study them one by one along with commentary. It contains the complete fragments and a generous selection of testimonies for twenty major Presocratic thinkers including cosmologists, ontologists, and sophists, setting translations opposite Greek and Latin texts on facing pages to allow easy comparison. The texts are grouped in chapters by author in mainly chronological order, each preceded by a brief introduction and an up-to-date bibliography, and followed by a brief commentary. Significant variant readings are noted. This edition contains new fragments and testimonies not included in the authoritative but now outdated Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. It is the first and only complete bilingual edition of the works of the Presocratic philosophers for English speakers.

  • About the Editor and Translator 

Daniel W. Graham is A. O. Smoot Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Aristotle’s Two Systems (1987); editor of the collected papers on ancient philosophy of Gregory Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy (2 vols., 1995); translator-commentator of Aristotle: Physics, Book VIII (1999); co-editor with Victor Caston of a Festschrift for his mentor: Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Alexander Mourelatos (2002); author of Explaining the Cosmos: the Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy (2006); and co-editor with Patricia Curd of The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy (2008).

Daniel W. Graham, Ph.D., has taught ancient Greek philosophy for forty years, first at Grinnell College, then at Rice University, and for most of his career at Brigham Young University, where he has been department chair and is now Abraham Owen Smoot Professor of Philosophy emeritus. He has been a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a visiting professor at Yale University. The recipient of two NEH fellowships, he has published nine books (in eleven volumes) with leading academic presses, one of which was named one of the best books of 2010 in the Times Literary Supplement, and authored over one hundred scholarly articles in journals of philosophy, classics, history of ideas, and history of science. He does research in eight languages, has lectured around the world, and is past president of the International Association for Presocratic Studies. Having traveled to most of the major Greek archaeological sites of Greece as well as of Italy and Turkey (where Greek colonies abounded), he has recently visited two remote battlefield sites in Greece, Potidaea and Amphipolis, where Socrates fought as a citizen soldier.