Concept of generation in the early Greek philosophy
Concept of generation in the early Greek philosophy

Summary/Abstract: The article has two objectives. Firstly, I shall reconstruct the change of conceptualization of genesis from the Ionian philosophy till the early atomists in order to explain how the idea of transformation and regularity of genesis was shaped in the early Greek philosophy. Secondly, I shall analyse the conception of regularity of generation in the fragments of Anaxagoras and the early atomists in order to reject F. Solmsen’s thesis that Epicurus’ negation of spontaneous genesis was not related with the early atomists. The methodology of the study is based on the semantic analysis of the philosophical texts. The linguistic method is applied to contextualize the philosophical concepts in the literary tradition and language use. In the reconstruction of development of conception of genesis I will try to prove that there has been an important shift in the meaning of genesis from the Ionian philosophers to Parmenides.

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