Prof. Victoria Wohl’s 2023 Sather Lectures have been published by the University of California Press as The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy. You can order a copy online – or get it for free as an eBook.
The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity.