Free EBooks and Texts - Greek Philosophy

Greek Philosophers

As it turns out, nearly all of the various cosmologies proposed by the early Greek philosophers are profoundly and demonstrably false, but this does not diminish their importance. For even if later philosophers summarily rejected the answers they provided, they could not escape their questions: What is life? From where does everything come? Of what does it really consist? How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature? And why can we describe them with a singular mathematics?

And the method the Greek philosophers followed in forming and transmitting their answers became just as important as the questions they asked. The pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations for the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. In other words they depended on reason and observation to illuminate the true nature of the world around them, and they used rational argument to advance their views to others. And though philosophers have argued at length about the relative weights that reason and observation should have, for two and a half millennia they have basically united in the use of the very method first used by the pre-Socratics. ^1*

E-texts Greek Philosophers

Classical Antiquity - Ancient Greece

Complete works of Aristotle

the Discourses of Epictetus

Greek Philosophy

Greek Philosophy Archive 

Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy

Last Days of Socrates

Heraclitus A lecture.

Heraclitus on the Logos

Works by Epicurus

Epicurean Resources

Description of Greece by Pausanias 

Gutenberg text; unofficial until 31 May 2003

Hellenistic History and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), ed. by Peter Green 

The Golden Sayings of Epictetus  transl. Hastings Crossley (English)

A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion  transl. George Long (English)

A Smaller History of Greece: From the Earliest Times to the Roman Conquest by William Smith 

History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, trans. by Richard Crawley 

Thucydides Mythistoricus by Francis M. Cornford 

Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) by Gregory Crane

The Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta, Excavated and Described by Members of the British School at Athens, 1906-1910, ed. by Richard McGillivray Dawkins 

The Secret History by Procopius of Caesarea, trans. by Richard Atwater.

The Chronographia by Michael Psellus, trans. by Edgar Robert Ashton Sewster

Epicurean Philosophy Online Another comprehensive Epicurean web site, maintained by Erik Anderson.

El Jardín A Spanish-language Epicurean web site maintained by Sergio Sotomayor Prat.

Epicure A French-language Epicurean web site by Mons-Grande Ville.

La Philosophie d'Epicure Another French-language Epicurean web site by Michel Liegeois.

Epicuro An Italian-language Epicurean web site maintained by Michele Pinto.

Epikur A German-language Epicurean web page by Michael Kuhn.

Epicurisme An Epicurean web page in Dutch.

Epicurismo An Epicurean web page in Portuguese.

Philodemos Poems

Share This