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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The principal texts are collected and translated in A. O.
Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in
Antiquity
(Baltimore, 1935). The best general survey of the
whole subject is still W. von Uxkull-Gyllenband, Griechische
Kultur-Entstehungslehren
(Berlin, 1924). For more special-
ized discussions, see B. Gatz, Weltalter, goldene Zeit und
sinnverwandte Vorstellungen
(Hildesheim, 1967); A. Klein
günther, “ΠΡΩΤΟΣ ΕΓΡΕΤΗΣ,” Philologus Suppl. 26.1
(1933) and K. Thraede, “Erfinder,” Reallexikon für Antike
und Christentum,
5 (1962), 1191-1278 (inventor catalogues);
T. Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology,
in American Philological Association Monographs XXV
(1967); W. Theiler, Geschichte der teleologischen Natur-
betrachtung bis auf Aristoteles
(Zürich, 1925); and E. A.
Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven,
1957), 25-124 (theories of cultural development in the larger
context of early Greek anthropological and political
thought). As is inevitable, since so many of the principal
authors survive only in fragments, all these studies make
extensive use of hypothetical reconstructions; and any two
scholars' reconstructions will show important areas of dis-
agreement. For views differing sharply from those here
presented of the importance of Democritus in the shaping
of the tradition and of the place of the idea of progress
in ancient thought see W. Spoerri, Späthellenistische
Berichte über Welt, Kultur und Götter
(Basel, 1959) and L.
Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Balti-
more, 1967), reviewed critically by E. R. Dodds, Journal
of the History of Ideas,
29 (1968), 453-57. For other relevant
passages from ancient authors see the very full survey in
K. Thraede, “Fortschritt,” Reallexikon für Antike und
Christentum,
8 (1969), 141-61.

THOMAS COLE

[See also Atomism; Culture and Civilization; Historiogra-
phy, Ancient Greek; Platonism; Pre-Platonic Conceptions;
Progress in Antiquity; Technology; Work.]