Before Philosophy

by John A. Wilson, Henri Frankfort, Thorkild Jacobsen

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014020198X
• ISBN13: 9780140201987
• Release Date: January 1946
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

It's a Revealing Examination Pre-Logical Thinking

Pre-Logical is probably a little extreme but certainly formal logic was lacking in mythopoetic explanations. There was a sense of cause and effect operating in the world but this was expressed through the operation of personalities (deities) rather than natural forces. There apparently was little understanding of contradiction. The main technique used to explain the operations of natural phenomena seems to be association, explaining A with what you know about B, even if A and B are totally different. It's a revealing and fascinating little book that is a must for anyone who is interested in the pre-Socratic philosophers. These thinkers are the bridge between mythopoetic and philosophical explanation. I really don't understand why this this book has been allowed to go out of print. Thankfully there are a few copies left.

Answers to so many questions

This book explains how utterly different ancients were from us in how they saw the world and themselves in it. And how - without assistance by unnatural applications of reason and science - we're precisely the same if allowed to be. It raises questions of how we can possibly save our natural world and truly believe in a spiritual reality if we and the natural world are subjected to modern thinking found to be so successful.Focusing on Sumer and Egypt we find the ancients didn't separate man from nature. Man was part of society embedded in nature, dependent on cosmic forces. Long before Old Testament declarations of conquest over nature, man was not in opposition. They obviously struggled "against" a "hostile" environment, but this account is our language describing their situation, not their state of mind. Reminiscent of Campbell's clarification between modern and ancient perspectives as "it" vs. "thou", our authors describe this difference as "subject" vs. "object". The ancients had one mode of expression, thought, speech - the personal. Everything had a will and personality revealing itself. They could reason logically but such intellectual detachment was hardly compatible with their experience of reality. Impersonal laws did not satisfy their understanding. When the river doesn't rise, it's not due to lack of rain - the river refused to rise. You'd not hurt yourself in a fall - the ground chose to hurt you, or not. Their view was qualitative and concrete, not quantitative and abstract. In science we apply a procedure, progressively reducing phenomena until subjected to universal laws. We "de-complicate" systems to understand them. There's a hierarchy of complexity making planetary motions simpler systems than say, living cells, thus more or less complete theories of each, but we've proven since Galileo initiated modern science that we're so close to the truth of nature (the judge of our understanding) that our theories can earn our acceptance through success of their predictions and utility. We really did build Voyager to that understanding and it really did what we thought it would when released to nature's command - three billion miles from earth, still obeying our grasp of nature. Furthermore, accurate theories are able to predict things never dreamed possible when created. Relativity still yields such surprises. We see phenomena as manifestations of general laws, not by what makes them peculiar. The ancient mind is termed "mythopoetic". Their perspective is why scriptures were written when they were and not anymore - writings imbibed with mystery and inflation of life one assumes we've lost to critical reason and economic forces. But the mythopoetic mind is still here, the natural mind we are born with. It's why we have palm readers, cults, astrologers, ghosts, UFOs, Creationists, pet psychics, TV conversations with the dead, best selling books on how to "know" God and beliefs that flying jets into buildings will send their pilots to heave