Ancient Philosophy in the News

• A bust of Plato at the University of California, Berkeley, long thought to be a modern forgery, has recently (2003) been discovered to be a genuinely ancient artifact depicting the philosopher. Take a look at this very slick slideshow of the bust.

• The New York Times Book Review (September 28, 1997) of “The Fire Within the Eye,” by David Park, a history of light: this book has a lot about ancient physical theories of matter, light, etc., and includes discussions of Thales, Empedocles, Democritus, and Aristotle. The author, David Park (a physicist, not a philosopher or an historian), is sometimes wrong about the details, but he is seldom uninteresting. (Read the first chapter of “The Fire Within the Eye.”)

• Aristotle’s Lyceum Found? Read all about it.

• Papyrus of Empedocles Found? Said to date from first century BCE.

• The oldest surviving Greek manuscript of antiquity is the Derveni Papyrus, which dates to ca. 340 BCE (during Aristotle’s lifetime!). It was discovered in 1962 during construction work on the National Road from Thessaloniki to Kavala. The papyrus, which contains a quasi-philosophical treatise explicating an Orphic poem, was badly carbonized by being burned in a funeral pyre. Now multispectral digital analysis is being used to make more of the surviving text legible. Here is an AP story about the research. For more about the Derveni Papyrus, see Pat Curd’s review of Gábor Betegh, The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation.

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