Presocratic Greek

is a people who lived still a relation to being in which human thinking did not take itself as the sole arbiter to which other things had to justify themselves but retained elements of a non-appropriative, non-conceptual relation to being.

The Greeks, Heidegger argues, had lived still a relation to being in which human thinking did not take itself as the sole arbiter to which other things had to justify themselves but retained elements of a nonappropriative, non-conceptual relation to being.

is possessed of a type of experience of being that was a pre-reflective; more originary relation to things that focused on the self-unfolding emergence in which individual things come forth from obscurity.

These are still legible in the surviving fragments of the archaic, Pre-Socratic philosophers and in the tragedies of Sophocles. This pre-reflective experience of being was not explicitly thought in classical Greek philosophy, yet it is the unthematized experience from which that thinking drew. This is why a more originary relation to things is still legible in the Greek language, as in ‘aletheia’, the word for truth, which is more literally ‘unconcealment’ as we have seen, or the word ‘physis’, commonly translated as ‘nature’ (cf. ‘physics’ ) but more precisely the ‘self-unfolding emergence’ in which individual things come forth from obscurity.

presocratic greek, n.Definitions

presocratic greek