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The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory (New Directions in German Studies)
The Laughter of the Thracian Woman A Protohistory of Theory - New Directions in German Studies Author:Hans Blumenberg This is the first English translation of Hans Blumenberg's The Laughter of the Thracian Woman, complete with annotations and a critical introduction. Blumenberg's book describes the reception history of an anecdote found in Plato's Theatetus dialogue: observing the stars above him, the early astronomer and proto-philosopher Thales of Miletus fa... more »ils to see a well directly in his path and tumbles down?perhaps to his death. A Thracian servant-girl laughs, amused by his attempts to see what was above him at the expense of what was before him.
Variants of this story recur in texts by Diogenes Laertius, Church Fathers Tertullian and Eusebius, Medieval and Renaissance-era preachers, Enlightenment figures Voltaire, Montaigne, Bacon, and Kant, and later by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Blumenberg's own contemporaries. Whether the philosophers who cite this anecdote sympathize with Thales' or chastise his negligence, Blumenberg shows how the story stands in for the unknowable history leading up to the intellectual attitude now known as "theory." By retelling the anecdote, philosophers reveal their distinctive values regarding absorption in curiosity, philosophy's past, and the demand that theorists abide by sanctioned methods and procedures.
Detailing the historically changing meaning of philosophers? most beloved metaphors, Blumenberg demonstrates how these have become indispensable to philosophy as metaphors, that is, as representations whose meanings remain undefined.« less