“The Soul of the Greeks offers fresh interpretations of age-old texts that are deep, insightful, and revelatory. Richly rewarding, lucid, and original, Davis’s approach will add substantially to the existing scholarship.”—Jill Frank, University of South Carolina

(Jill Frank, University of South Carolina )

“From Homer’s Iliad to Aristotle’s De Anima, from Herodotus’s history and Euripides’ tragedies to the Platonic dialogues, Michael Davis recovers, through his probing readings of the Greeks, the fundamental problem of the human soul. Attuned to the recurrent puzzles that lead to the philosophic core of these works, Davis explores and illuminates their understanding of the essential ‘alienation’ of soul—its distance from the world—as the condition for its deepest longing and the nature of soul revealed by its necessary imperfection.”—Ronna Burger, Tulane University

(Ronna Burger, Tulane University )

“In The Soul of the Greeks Michael Davis takes up what may be the central and still unsolved problem of ancient philosophy—namely, what is soul? On the basis of a series of careful readings of selections from Aristotle, Herodotus, Euripides, and Plato, Davis argues that the question cannot be approached or answered directly, because soul is characterized by a certain kind of duality. It cannot know itself without seeing itself as somehow other, nor can it achieve its desire to become one and immortal without destroying itself. As Davis indicates by including analyses of works that have been characterized as history and poetry as well as philosophy, the question of the character of the human soul is not merely at the heart of the ‘ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy’ (if there really is such a quarrel). It extends from the question of personal identity to the character and grounds of our common life, including the possibility and basis of our knowledge of the world.”—Catherine Zuckert, University of Notre Dame

(Catherine Zuckert, University of Notre Dame )

“Davis’s book illustrates the meaning of philosophy, as it moves its reader from ordinary experience to profound insight about our human condition. Its breadth is as far-reaching as its depth, for what it understands by ‘psychology’ involves poetry and tragedy, barbarism and civilization, knowledge and intelligibility, politics and history, and cosmic principles and the divine. We might say of Davis’s book what he himself says of one the texts he discusses, ‘there is much to think about here.’ The Soul of the Greeks deserves to be one of the more important philosophic works of this century.”—Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University

(Mary P. Nichols )