Historical Dictionary of Ancient Greek Philosophy (2nd edition)

RR 2016/076 Historical Dictionary of Ancient Greek Philosophy (2nd edition) Anthony Preus Rowman & Littlefield Lanham, MD and London 2015 xxiv + 513 pp. ISBN 978 1 4422 4638 6 (hbck); ISBN 978 1 4422 4639 3 (e-book) £85 $130 Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies and Movements

Keywords Ancient Greece, Dictionaries, History, Philosophy

Review DOI 10.1108/RR-01-2016-0028

We know both a lot and a little about ancient Greek philosophy. We have the names of hundreds of philosophers and yet for most of them very little about their ideas and writings, let alone their lives. This is very well illustrated by this reference book, which has 400 pages of mostly short entries from some 1,250 years, from Thales of Miletus (born c.620 BCE) to Isidore of Seville, "the last scholar of the ancient world" (died 636 CE). The entries run from Abdera, a city in Northern Greece and birthplace of Democritus, to Zosimus of Panoplis (third-fourth century CE), an alchemist and Gnostic.

The volume starts with a 5-page chronology, followed by an introduction of 23 pages which is, in effect, a short history of ancient Greek philosophy. After...