History of Ancient Philosophy

A university textbook on Greek and Roman philosophy, from Thales to the closing of the Athenian Academy in 529, and it says so on its first working page: intended for students of the humanities, and useful for self-education.

Its distinction is that Bogomolov reads the Greeks in the Greek sources. Where many Soviet books on Western thought reach their subjects at second hand, through approved summaries, he works from the fragments and the ancient doxographers - the compilers and commentators who preserved what the originals lost - and from the modern critical editions, weighing evidence rather than relaying a verdict. The apparatus is a working scholar's.

He was a genuine one: a professor at Moscow State University who spent a career on ancient thought, on Hegel, and on the currents of twentieth-century Western philosophy.

The result is a clear and well-proportioned survey - the Presocratics, the sophists and Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, then the Hellenistic schools, Epicureans, Stoics and sceptics, and the Neoplatonists - and it remains one of the more useful single-volume accounts available in English from outside the Anglophone tradition.

For once there is no hidden earlier date and no lag between a manuscript closed in one decade and a jacket printed in another. This is late-Soviet academic philosophy caught almost in real time, written for the last cohort of students before perestroika reached the philosophy faculties.

Translated by Vladimir Stankevich.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the friction between a well-furnished mind and the frame it had to build around.