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15The emergence of philosophical interest in cognitionOxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 12 1-34. 1994.On some accounts, early reflection on the nature of human cognition focused on its physical or physiological causes (as, for example, when in fragment 105 Empedocles identifies thought with blood). On other accounts, there was an identifiable process of semantic development in which a number of perception-oriented terms for knowing (e.g. gignôskô, oida, noeô, and suniêmi) took on a more intellectual orientation. Although some find evidence of this transition in the poems of Solon and Archilochus…Read more
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40The humanizing of knowledge in presocratic thoughtIn Patricia Curd & Daniel W. Graham (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2008.This article explores Presocratic epistemology, arguing that divine revelation is replaced as a warrant for knowledge with naturalistic accounts of how and what we humans can know; thus replacing earlier Greek pessimism about knowledge with a more optimistic outlook that allows for human discovery of the truth. A review of the relevant fragments and testimonia shows that Xenophanes, Alcmaeon, Heraclitus, and Parmenides—even Pythagoras and Empedocles—all moved some distance away from the older “g…Read more
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17Odysseás Elytis's Conversation with Heraclitus: "Of Ephesus"Philosophy and Literature 44 (2): 226-236. 2020.ARRAY
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22Borges's Love Affair with HeraclitusPhilosophy and Literature 41 (1A): 303-314. 2017.In an early poem, "Year's End", Jorge Luis Borges takes the turning of the year as an occasion to consider how "something in us" endures, despite the fact that we are products of "infinite random possibilities" and "droplets in the stream of Heraclitus": It is not the emblematic detail of replacing a two with a three, nor that barren metaphor that brings together a time that dies and another coming up nor yet the rounding out of some astronomical process that stuns and undermines the altiplano1 …Read more
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51 Parmenidean ElenchosIn Scott Gary Alan (ed.), Does Socrates Have a Method?: Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato's Dialogues and Beyond, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 19-35. 2002.
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139‘Early Interest in Knowledge’In A. A. Long (ed.), The Cambridge companion to early Greek philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 225-249. 1999.Western philosophy begins with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Or so we are told by Aristotle and many members of the later doxographical tradition. But a good case can be made that several centuries before the Milesian thinkers began their investigations, the poets of archaic Greece reflected on the limits of human intelligence and concluded that no mortal being could know the full and certain truth. Homer belittled the mental capacities of ‘creatures of a day’ and a series of poets of the…Read more
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188‘Mind’s Knowledge and Powers of Control in Anaxagoras DK B 12’Phronesis 40 (2): 125-142. 1995.In fragment B 12 Anaxagoras asserted: ‘And [Mind] has every gnômê concerning everything and is strong to the greatest degree.’ The definitions of gnômê given in the standard Greek lexicon cover a wide range: ‘mark’, ‘token’, ‘intelligence’, ‘thought’, ‘judgment’, ‘understanding’, ‘attention’, ‘conscience’, ‘reason’, ‘will’, ‘disposition’, ‘inclination’, ‘purpose’, ‘initiative’, ‘opinion’, ‘verdict’, ‘decision’, ‘proposition’, ‘resolution’, ‘advice’, and ‘maxim’. Taking a clue from the assonanc…Read more
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228‘Perceiving and Knowing in the Iliad and Odyssey’Phronesis 26 (1): 2-24. 1981.It is a commonplace in our histories of early Greek thought that philosophical reflection began in the final decades of the 6th century BC when Thales and his Milesian associates launched their inquiries into various natural phenomena. The historians Goody and Watt argue that this sort of thinking could have begun only when alphabetic literacy was fairly widespread. I offer a critique of the Goody and Watt thesis and provide as a counter example various portions of the Homeric poems that merit c…Read more
James Lesher
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