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There is nothing original about my first, second, and fifth features, but the third and fourth require some amplification. "30 His enthusiasm for these thinkers is beguiling, but they actually become far more interesting when we acknowledge that their rationality was neither simple nor straightforward. 31 This characterization will strike many people as appropriate only to some later ancient philosophies, but it has the great merit of asking us not to impute modernist conceptions of philosophy's complete disinterestedness or "pure" inquiry to classical antiquity.

340. 29 Plato, Gorg. 449b-c, Hippias minor 363c-369a, Hippias major 285b, and Prot. 3i8e,- cf. Lloyd [ i n ] 91-95. Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 The scope of early Greek philosophy 21 30 Popper [122] 130. 31 Pierre Hadot. See his Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford/Cambridge, Mass. 1995) and Qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique2. (Paris, 1995). 32 Euripides, fr. 910. The passage, from an unknown play, is cited in Greek by Burnet [6] io; my translation. 3 3 In characterizing early Greek philosophy as I have done, I do not presume to speak for my fellow contributors.

In certain contexts, Aristotle is quite prepared to find philosophical thoughts in figures prior to Thales. And was Thales or Anaximander the first Ionian philosopher? D. 13). 20 Suspicion about this is natural when one reads that Pherecydes was the teacher of Pythagoras (D. L. ), and Pherecydes too is pushed back by Diogenes into the ranks of "wise men" prior to philosophy. "21 One justification for that procedure will emphasize the difference between the mythological cosmogonies of Hesiod and Pherecydes and the early Ionian cosmologists' reference to observable regularities that do not depend upon the arbitrary will of divinities.