The Origins of Political and Moral Philosophy in Ancient Greek Tragedy and Beyond

The open access book offers a new understanding of the beginning of political and moral philosophy, and traces its early history in Greece before Plato.

Exploring the origins of political and moral philosophy in Greek antiquity, this open access book suggests a new point of departure and offers a different history of political thought. Specifically, it traces the evolution of the theory of the ‘internal critique’, which is the idea of assessing an argument from within. Current scholarship argues that such techniques of argumentation are a Platonic invention, but Johan Tralau claims that these forms of argumentation have a fascinating prehistory originating in Homer and early Hittite sources, such as a late Bronze Age Gilgamesh fragment.

This study then moves on to look at the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides who, Tralau argues, have the greatest role in the development of argumentation. The result is a presentation of the history of normative argument as well as a number of fresh interpretations of some of the most important ancient Greek authors. Finally, the epilogue draws on several comparative examples of the ‘internal critique’ in Chinese and Indic literary and political sources, which help to showcase this new way of understanding the history and legacy of normative argument.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.