The Philosophic Spirit

The philosophic spirit has persisted as part of the human spirit and human culture for over twenty-five centuries. This book presents examples of this spirit from its beginnings in Greek thought through the modern age. Among these examples are an account of Empedocles jumping into the volcano of Mt. Etna to join the gods, Plato’s quarrel with the poets, St. Anselm’s famous argument for the existence of God, Descartes’s Archimedean proof of his own existence, and Kant’s description of the perfect island of the Understanding. Attention is also given to Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms and Whitehead’s theory of actual entities. The volume concludes with a discussion, based on the thought of Giambattista Vico, of a way to approach philosophy through a balance between the Ancient and the Moderns.



Donald Phillip Verene is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University and Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. He is the author of numerous books, including Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, Vico’s New Science: A Philosophical Commentary, and The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy.