Unlike volume 1 in the series on Early Greek Philosophy from Loeb, volume 2 – “Early Greek Philosophy – Beginnings and Early Ionians Thinkers” has a wealth of information. For these early Greek Philosophers, we have very few, if any, writings remaining from them to know exactly what they believed, and in some cases we don’t know if there were any writings at all. However, what we do have is other people writing about them, who write about what they have been told, or read about these early Philosophers.

The book has a “Preliminaries” section which includes a section on Doxography and successions, and this is followed by a “Background” section which discusses what was thought about the cosmos and gods and men. This sets up the first discussions on the earliest philosophers of which we have any kind of evidence. The four earliest philosophers discussed are Pherecydes, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. We get an impression of what was thought about each of these philosophers, but this serves more as a foundation for learning about Greek Philosophy and how it evolved than it does as evidence of what any of these Philosophers actually said or potentially wrote.

I would have preferred if Loeb and merged this volume with volume 1 to provide the full foundation of the methodology and earliest thoughts in one volume to provide a great start for this series of books, but even without that this volume has a lot of value in and of itself. ( )