Where to start reading the pre-Socratics

Reading the pre-Socratics directly, without preparation, tends to frustrate: they are fragments, not books, cited centuries later by other authors, without the context that the original text had. There are three different gateways, and the order between them matters.

First door: the shock of the original fragment

To feel what it is like to read, with your own hands, remains from two thousand six hundred years ago, the door is the pre-Socratics volume of the Brazilian collection Os Pensadores. It is not a foreign edition of a single work, but a Portuguese-language anthology that gathers the precious little that remains of these philosophers, and it has the advantage of placing the reader in front of the raw text, without excessive intermediation. It is the shortest and most immediate reading of the three, but it is also the one that most exposes the reader to a feeling of strangeness: a fragment alone, without context, can be read in very different, and sometimes misleading, ways.

Second door: the technical and contextualized study

For those who want to understand what each fragment meant within the author's thought, and not run the risk of projecting modern meaning where it does not fit, the reference is "The Presocratic Philosophers", by Kirk, Raven and Schofield, internationally recognized as a standard work on the period. The book brings the fragment together with the historical, philological and philosophical context that supports it, the type of support that avoids reading Anaximander as if he were a modern physicist, or Thales as if he were just a naive curiosity.

Third door: why read this at all

And there is a third door, which changes the reason you read the first two: "What Is Ancient Philosophy?", by Pierre Hadot. The book reminds us that, for the pre-Socratics and for the ancients in general, philosophizing was never about accumulating theories about the world, it was a way of living, a practice, an exercise. Reading Hadot before the fragments changes the question you ask the text: not "what did this philosopher think existed?", but "what exercise of attention to the real was this philosopher practicing when he wrote this?".

In what order to face the fragments

There is no mandatory order, but there is one that works well for those starting from scratch: first Hadot, to understand why it is worth the effort; then Kirk, Raven and Schofield, to gain the map and context; and only then the Os Pensadores volume, to find the same fragments again now with prepared eyes, feeling the shock without getting lost in it. A text two thousand six hundred years old does not surrender at first, and does not need to surrender: resistance is part of the exercise.

Continue: Who were the pre-Socratics · The only fragment of Anaximander · What is the philosophical attitude · What is Fides et Ratio
Source class (NousCast Community): Quem foram os Pré-Socráticos? O momento em que o mundo deixou de ser explicado por deuses