From Deseret News archives:
BYU professor a pre-Socratic sleuth
Haven't heard of Parmenidies? That doesn't surprise Daniel Graham.
Graham, the A.O. Smoot professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University, says that while the public recognizes the name of Socrates and other famous Greek philosophers, there were other Western thinkers, like Parmenidies, who have been largely forgotten by history.
They deserve credit for their innovative theories, said Graham, who has received a contract from prestigious Cambridge University Press to write a bilingual text of pre-Socratic philosophers. Through his book, "The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy," Graham is hoping these unsung philosophers will be recognized for their work.
"They've been neglected," he said. "I hope it revives interest in them. I think they are the founders of scientific thinking in the West."
Virtually all of the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers have been lost, Graham said. "We have fragments of those writings, written on papyrus, from ancient sources who could read them. There are also reports by people who knew of them called testimonies. What we try to do is reconstruct these theories."
To this point, the scholarly standard of pre-Socratic philosophy has been "Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker" by Hermann Diels, written about 100 years ago and later edited by Walther Kranz. In the book, fragments were translated into German.
The latest version of the book came out a half-century ago. Since that time, there have been more discoveries of works by ancient Greek philosophers.
"The book is old and hasn't been kept up-to-date," Graham said. "It's become obsolete. There's a desperate need for a good source book."
Graham's work will include the original texts along with the English translation and a brief commentary on the texts. The book will supersede the Diels-Kranz tome as the standard source for early Greek philosophy.
In 1999, a scrap of papyrus discovered in a Strasbourg, France, library contained the writings of Empedocles, who lived in Sicily during the fifth century B.C.
"The papyrus hadn't been seen in 100 years," Graham said. Empedocles' work was published in 1999 and will be included in Graham's book.
"It's exciting to have new material from these philosophers," Graham said.
The pre-Socratic philosophers made a major impact on the world, Graham said.
"Before that time, mythology which developed during the time of the pre-Socratics was used to explain natural phenomena in nature," he said. "These philosophers pioneered scientific explanations. Without them, it's hard to imagine we'd have the kind of science we have today."
The drawback of their theories is that they weren't able to put them to the test, Graham said. They based their arguments on what they could see.
"Their theories provide tremendous insights," he said. "We can learn a lot from pre-Socratics."
E-mail: jeffc@desnews.com
