Detalles del libro

Anyone who wishes to think beyond our conventional categories of theories of progress, the history of western scientific rationality, the impasse of science vs. religion and philosophy vs. theology, or the contest of global values will find this book exhilarating, stimulating, perplexing, and refreshing-a dazzling anti-history of the tradition of western rationality. Todd Breyfogle, Director of Seminars, The Aspen Institute, USA, and editor of Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern This is an engaging and original book that unsettles the received narrative of Early Greek philosophy as the birth of reason. The book's aim is to remythologize reason right from the quick - relishing the religious impulse of all genuine philosophical reflection. In Hollingworth's hands the history of ideas becomes a living thing, a love song to the fragile moments of understanding that always open onto that which exceeds us. Perhaps best of all, the book performs its own argument. The reader is left to share the author's grateful wonder that there is something rather than nothing. Joseph Clair, Director of the William Penn Honors Program and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, George Fox University, USA In Plato's great analogy for education-the analogy of the cave-it is far from clear what would compel a soul, having ascended to a sunlit world of clarity, to return to a place of depths and indetermination. Plato's Socrates speaks of necessity and suggests the need, if not the desire, for a conversion of all things indeterminate into perfected beauties, like butterflies on pins. Hollingworth adds the framing of the Presocratics and returns us, more explicitly than does Plato, to an invented Socrates, standing, like the concept of invention itself, at the crossroads of science and imagination. Indeed Socrates will have become that crossroads by way of Hollingworth's fierce and visionary prose. Here is not a crossroads to be left behind, as we either ascend towards an enlightened modernity or regress towards ancient imaginings; Hollingworth exhorts us instead to inhabit a capacious psychology, ever at a crossroads, and take our necessities from there. Inventing Socrates is an unexpected book, a knock at the door from the God within. James Wetzel, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of St. Augustine, Villanova University, USA