"The Origins of Greek Thought" by Jean-Pierre Vernant

Jean-Pierre Vernant's book, "The Origins of Greek Thought," is a critical reassessment of a dominant historical trope for Western antiquity: that Greek philosophy amazingly materialized out of thin air after the Dorian Invasion. As an alternative to this popular idea, Vernant rationalizes the revolution of Greek thought as it pertains to the development of the polis (city), the development of philosophy, along with the idea that logic was developed by accompanying death of the monarchy …

…and the aristocrats, and the reappearance of writing with the aid of the Phoenician alphabet, and apolitical society unmatched by any society before Athens. Jean-Pierre Vernant shows us that the birth of philosophy is in no way due to magic. He asserts that there are steps we can follow in history to make meaning out of the unexplainable. The geneses of Greek philosophy were the consequences of a new polis which sprouted individual political ideas.