Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher
Description:
A strange, wild, brilliant personal journey - across land and through time - in which Laura Beatty travels back two thousand years to rescue from obscurity Aristotle's friend and Chaucer's inspiration, the forgotten philosopher who grandfathered botany and the English novel.
Who is Theophrastus, and why should we care?\nOnce, he was the equal of Plato and Aristotle. Together he and Aristotle invented science. Alone he invented Botany. The character of the Wife of Bath is his invention, the Canterbury Tales as a whole, perhaps, the product of his inspiration. When Linnaeus was developing our modern system of plant taxonomy, it was Theophrastus' work on plants that he used as a basis. So how could one man do so much and still sink almost without a trace?\nThis is the story of a journey to find him and bring him back from oblivion. Looking for Theophrastus, in all the places he must have walked and lived, it tells how he and Aristotle, his friend and tutor, broke with the philosophical conventions of the Academy and left on their own adventure; of how together they invented what we now take for granted as the Natural Sciences; how, not content with that, they made the great experiment of applying philosophy directly to the practicalities of government through the tutoring of Alexander the Great; how they were disappointed and how, in the end, they returned to Athens and founded the famous Lyceum.\nAgainst the dramatic context of his time - the end of democracy in Athens and the rise of Alexander the Great; the great battles and vast territorial expansion that followed; the flowering of the philosophy schools on which so much of our culture and thinking is founded - and on, following his cultural legacy through to the modern day, it explores how we perceive, understand and, most importantly, how we relate to the world around us, questioning what we lose from our way of living when we forget those ancients who first taught us how to see.
Best prices to buy, sell, or rent ISBN 9781838954369
Frequently Asked Questions about Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher
The price for the book starts from $14.03 on Amazon and is available from 12 sellers at the moment.
If you’re interested in selling back the Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher book, you can always look up BookScouter for the best deal. BookScouter checks 30+ buyback vendors with a single search and gives you actual information on buyback pricing instantly.
As for the Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher book, the best buyback offer comes from and is $ for the book in good condition.
The Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher book is in very low demand now as the rank for the book is 1,878,661 at the moment. A rank of 1,000,000 means the last copy sold approximately a month ago.
The highest price to sell back the Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher book within the last three months was on December 17 and it was $1.53.