The Beginning of Knowledge

Description

The Beginning of Knowledge brings together almost all of Gadamer's essays on the Presocratics. In each of the essays Gadamer discusses the origins of knowledge in the western philosophical tradition. Beginning with a hermeneutical and philological investigation of the Heraclitus fragments he moves on to a discussion of the Greek Atomists and the Presocratic cosmologists. In the final two essays he elaborates on the profound debt that modern science owes to the Greeks and shows how their works have shaped modern day physics, mathematics and medicine. The philosophers discussed include Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides. This is a major work from one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) was a celebrated and influential continental philosopher. He spent the majority of his teaching career at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where he became emeritus professor in 1968. He is the author of The Beginning of Philosophy and Truth and Method.

[Gadamer's] views on the ancient Greeks provide a powerful reply to Heidegger's enormously creative, but less than accurate interpretations...Whether or not one finds Gadamer's Platonic route to the pre-Socratics to be successful, he produces stimulating insights into their views and challenges one to rearticulate why Gadamer might be wrong, if he is wrong. Such challenges are always welcome. * David Vessey in Philosophy in Review *