Books like Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks — picked by fans

If Gadamer is an important guide to the hermeneutics of beginnings and the spirit of theorizing, Thomas Martin’s work is one of the most concise, readable, and comprehensive introductions to the social history of ancient Greece and the spiritual origins of Western culture. While there are many fine histories of the period, this book provides access to the whole sweep of Greek history from the beginnings of Hellenic civilization in Indo-European and Mycenaean cultures, to the Archaic age, the beginnings of democracy with the age of the city-state, the collapse of the Athenian Empire at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and the rise of Hellenistic Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms that led to the hegemony of Rome and Latin culture. The work is an exemplary form of what I would call 'configurational’ history as his narrative interweaves military, political, religious, and social history with detailed discussion of the realm… show more.

The Kirk and Raven translation of the Presocratic Philosophers was one of the first anthologies in English to cover the beginnings of speculation and philosophical discourse in early Greek culture. It essentially made the thought of the Presocratics available to me and, on a broader scale, to an English-speaking audience (drawing upon the German text of Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker and later editions edited by Walther Kranz (known to scholars as `Diels-Kranz’). While Kirk & Raven has been revised and edited by others it remains for me the first `path’ into ancient Greek thought (and thereby, to ways of thinking about the beginnings of theorizing and philosophy).

In terms of substance the work explores the transition from mythic traditions (Hesiod, Pherecydes, etc.) and Homeric poetry to the Ionian thinkers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus), the radical monistic ontology of the Italian Schools (Pythagoras, Alcmaeon, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, and… show more.

As a student of both sociology and philosophy I was profoundly influenced by the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. One of these inspiring 'others’ was Hans-Georg Gadamer who promoted a radically interpretive or `hermeneutic’ approach to philosophical issues. While his major work is Truth and Method this collection of essays concerns itself with origins and 'beginnings,’ inviting readers to enter a dialogue with some of the key figures and problematics of Greek and thereby of Western European thought and culture. Plato was Gadamer’s great love and Gadamer rejects Heidegger’s reading of the Platonic Dialogues as the first phase of Western metaphysics and commends a reading of Platonic and Aristotelian thought as a spirited rejection of dogmatic thinking and a path toward a dialogical vision of thought and inquiry.

Collins’ remarkable book is resolutely sociological and global. This path-breaking work formulates questions about the origins of thought and philosophical reflection in a comparative perspective. Avoiding traditional forms of Eurocentrism, Collins locates the Presocratic and Post-Socratic thinkers in social networks of groups and schools and the creative innovations of these schools are situated in a broader historical study of intellectual communities that include Ancient China, Ancient India, and Japan, and in a more recent context the interweaving constellations of Judaic, Christian, and Islamic thought. The work concludes with detailed analyses of the intellectual networks of early modern and modern philosophy (including the Vienna Circle, Analytic Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Phenomenology, Existentialism, and beyond). This work remains one of the great attempts of a social theorist to map the major currents of world thought and intellectual culture. The task first broached by Collins—to reconstruct the global social, political, military, and intellectual contexts… show more.

An inspirational exploration of profound contemplations on forgetting, which takes the reader on a guided tour through neglected passages in the writings of illustrious writers from antiquity to present times, including Homer, Ovid, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Locke, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Nietzsche, Sartre, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Böll, Borges, and many others.

Named “Denker des Vaderlands” in 2021 by the Stichting Maand van de Filosofie in the Netherlands, Paul van Tongeren’s introductory text is among the few that not only advances theses of Nietzsche, but also explicitly outlines a hermeneutics for approaching a range of texts in their idiosyncratic rhetorical style. For me, the second chapter was a sort of watershed moment where I came to realize how many layers there are to Nietzsche’s writing—and how slow and ruminative a reader should be in interpreting his ideas. When one follows van Tongeren’s techniques, a whole kaleidoscope of new meanings emerge in central ideas like ‘Will to Power’ or his critiques of religion and morality, respectively. The Nietzsche that van Tongeren portrays is not the truth-seeking philosopher so much as the physician of culture, someone not after demonstration and proof so much as the diagnosis and therapy for a Europe fractured by the… show more.

When I was a struggling young graduate student, I was fortunate enough to have Volker Gerhardt host me as a Fulbright Scholar at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. A former vice-president of the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Gerhardt is one of those remarkably industrious luminaries, who, with even a word of encouragement, can launch an entire area of inquiry. Working within what one might call a Kantian-Humanistic orientation, he has written widely on the most varied aspects of intellectual culture. This introductory book on Nietzsche, which is now in its fourth edition, is masterly in balancing the needs of new readers with the sort of nuances from which seasoned scholars continue to draw. Gerhardt’s Nietzsche is somewhat the cultural pragmatist, concerned above all with living an authentic life in the context of a continually-forming Europe. 

What I love about this book is the fact that it indicates that an apparently apolitical metaphilosophical assumption agrees with an upfront right-wing policy.

The assumption is that when tackling disputes in metaphysics, philosophers should aim to achieve consensus. The policy is that of pressing one to respect the allegedly rationally undeniable standards of a “herd,” as Nietzsche puts it. While problematizing this view, Nietzsche argues that libertarian tendencies of expressing one’s uniqueness are more valuable than more egalitarian tendencies of following herds; to provoke dissensus would then be more valuable than to reach consensus.

This stance has influenced me, even though while problematizing Nietzsche’s works through Carnap’s (and vice-versa), I claim that libertarian and egalitarian tendencies are equally valuable so that one should aim for a balance between them.

I was gifted this book recently and it is the gift that keeps on giving.

I am an avid walker and the way the author interspersed poignant life stories with his own on walking was lovingly poetic. This quote “the walker is king, and the earth is his domain” is the one that defines the entire message of the book. I’ve been on many pilgrimages in life and witnessed many a transformation but none like the ones these philosophers uncover.

It was a joy to read the profound messages in staying present while walking as exercise. Grab a friend and enjoy walking together as you put one foot in front of the other and have meaningful conversation. 

When I was researching Luck, I came across many books that claimed to teach the willing acolyte how to seize opportunity and how to maximise reward while minimising risk. This is the one that’s worth paying attention to. The Oracle is a collection of three hundred maxims for practical success, in condensed, often paradoxical form, written by a seventeenth-century Jesuit. Nietzsche said of it that "Europe has never produced anything finer or more complicated in matters of moral subtlety" and who’s going to argue with Nietzsche?