The Origins of Philosophy: Its Rise in Myth and the Pre-Socratics

Dr. Drew A. Hyland traces the origins of philosophy from its earliest roots in Babylonian and Homeric-Hesiodic mythology to its flowering in the Pre-Socratic imagination. Using selections from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hesiod, Homer, Pythagoras, Zeno, Plato, and Socrates, to name but a few, Dr. Hyland argues against what he calls the historical approach to the origin of philosophy. In Hyland's view the differentiation of the human self from notions of God and nature may rightly be called the origin of philosophy. The book's skilled intermingling of original source material, with commentaries by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, among others, and the author's own thought-provoking introduction, provides an invaluable study of this fascinating period in human intellectual development.