The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature

The present translation is based on the second edition of Die Entdeckung des Geistes (Claassen und Goverts, Hamburg, 1948), with the addition of the essay which here appears as Ch. 7: Human Knowledge and Divine Knowledge.

In this immensely erudite book, German classicist Bruno Snell traces the establishment of a rational view of the nature of man as evidenced in the literature of the Greeks - in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, and in the drama. Here are the crucial stages in the intellectual evolution of the Greek world: the Homeric world view, the rise of the individual in the early Greek lyric, myth and reality in Greek tragedy, Greek ethics, the origin of scientific thought, and Arcadia.