a book I’ve enjoyed for years

If you have trouble keeping all the pre-Socratics straight, there’s a work that might help, and it’s among my favorite history of philosophy books:

Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy

I won’t link to it on Amazon because there seem to be a profusion of editions of it there now. The one I have is the Dover paperback, but I can’t find that exact version on Amazon.

Zeller was one of those great 19th century German scholars who knew his material inside and out. A few changes were made to the book posthumously by a sympathetic heir of Zeller, to take more recent research into account.

It’s compact, readable, and memorable. You’ll have less trouble than before in remembering the difference between Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Anaxagoras.

Oftentimes, people want to read the most recent book on a subject. And there are times when that’s a good idea, especially in quickly evolving fields like the sciences. But when it comes to areas like history, literature, philosophy, I tend to think that any book still in print after more than a century must have a lot going for it.

For instance, I was recently reading a book of Roman history published in the last 5 years. And it was just painful to read in comparison with Gibbon, even though there are now known to be some definite factual inaccuracies in Gibbon.

The prejudice of recentness is based on the notion that factual accuracy is the basic building block of wisdom. It’s not. That plays a secondary role, as long as the facts are in the ballpark. More important is the ability to synthesize, systematize, reflect.

As I’ve said before on this blog, though not in some time, knowledge is not about being right, it’s about not missing the point.

The great philosophers did not make fewer bad arguments than others, they simply missed the point less often than the narrow and the correct usually do.