THE SHIFT FROM MUTHOS TO LOGOS Sample Clauses

THE SHIFT FROM MUTHOS TO LOGOS. The roots of the western intellectual tradition can be traced back to a peculiar shift that occurred in ancient Greece from myth to philosophy.41 Its fundamental importance for the development of humankind is widely recognized, but the precise details of this transition remain a subject of debate. The shift in scholarship from maintaining the old opposition between muthos and logos to a more complex picture of their relationship has been well documented.42 The long enduring attitude among scholars was that sometime roughly between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C.E., an intellectual revolution occurred in the ancient world. A childlike faith in the tales of the creation of the world and its order, imbued with anthropomorphism, gradually gave way to a set of non- anthropomorphic and naturalistic explanations of the cosmos. The mythological accounts found in the poems of Xxxxx and Xxxxxx were eventually replaced by the rational accounts set forth by the first philosophers, the Presocratics. The terms that are employed in characterizing this shift, muthos and logos, are notoriously difficult to define, as is the nature of their relationship. The original meaning of muthos was ‘word’ or ‘speech’, in contrast to ‘deed’ (ergon). It also denoted unspoken words or thoughts. Generally, it was used in reference to a story or narrative, though without any connotations of truth or falsity. Only in the fifth century B.C.E. did it come