To Think Like God
(Scholarly and fully annotated edition)

TO THINK LIKE GOD focuses on the emergence of philosophy as a speculative science, tracing its origins to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, from the late 6th century to mid-5th century B.C. Special attention is paid to the sage Pythagoras and his movement, the poet Xenophanes of Colophon, and the lawmaker Parmenides of Elea. In their own ways, each thinker held that true insight, whether as wisdom or certainty, belonged not to mortal human beings but to the gods.

The Pythagoreans sought to approach this otherworldly knowledge by studying numerical relationships, believing them to govern the universe, and that those who know the number of a thing know its true nature. Yet their quest was a hopeless one, bogged down by cultism, numerology, political conspiracies, bloody uprisings, and exile. Above all, number did not turn out as the most reliable of mediums; it was certainly not a key to the realm of the divine. Thus, their contributions to philosophy's inception, while much better publicized, were not the most significant. That particular role was reserved for an unusual challenge and the elaborate reaction it provoked.

The challenge came from Xenophanes, who had argued...

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Arnold Hermann

To Think Like God (Scholarly and fully annotated edition)
Pythagoras and Parmenides
The Origins of Philosophy
DEC 2004, 404 pages
7 illustrations
Cloth 6 1/2" x 9 1/4"
ISBN 1-930972-00-8
$32.00sp/£22.50

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Arnold Hermann

The Illustrated To Think Like God
Pythagoras and Parmenides
The Origins of Philosophy
DEC 2004, 336 pages,
210 illustrations
Cloth 7 1/2" x 9 3/4"
ISBN 1-930972-17-2
$35.00/£24.50

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The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman
In the Statesman, Plato brings together—only to challenge and displace—his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama. In his 1980 study, reissued here, Mitchell Miller employs literary theory and conceptual analysis to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, revealing that its chaotic variety of movements is actually a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean.

The original study left one question outstanding: what specifically, in the metaphysical order of things, motivated the nameless Visitor from Elea to abandon bifurcation for his consummating non-bifurcatory division of fifteen kinds at the end of the dialogue? Miller addressed that question in a separate essay, first published in 1999 and reprinted here. In it, he opens the horizon of interpretation to include the new metaphysics of the Parmenides, the Philebus, and the "unwritten teachings."

This study demonstrates how the Statesman is the culminating expression of Plato's lifelong effort, both in Athens and in the Academy, to bring metaphysical insight to the unending political crisis of his times.

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Originally published in 1980 in the Netherlands by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
This paperback edition includes a new preface and the essay "Dialectic Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato's Statesman" ©1999 by the Catholic University of America Press. Reprinted with permission.