Essays on ancient symbolism and mythology

This publication includes one of the most important works of Alexei Fedorovich Losev “Essays on ancient symbolism and mythology” (1930) In this fundamental work, the author, on a wide actual material, exploring ancient thought and culture, as well as the history of the perception of antiquity with European culture, develops its original concept of Platonism. Having a review of the most influential theories of symbolic, developed by Western thinkers of the XIX - early XX century, Losev, as one of the most characteristic features of ancient culture, distinguishes the intuition of bodily and plastic and visual expressiveness, which is aimed at the synthesis of the infinite and final in a specific, often mystically meaningful form . The book pays considerable attention to the mythological and symbolic aspects of early Greek philosophical thought, a systematic study of Plato"s teachings about ideas is undertaken. Losev connects the concept of idea as an extremely expressive cognitive form of things with ideas about plastic clarity that existed in ancient culture. A separate essay is dedicated to the worldview of Aristotle. In order to give a complete picture of the worldview of the philosopher Losev, he is studying Aristotelian aesthetics, poetics and pedagogy and finds in Aristotle"s philosophy common, in his opinion, features for the whole ancient culture. The worldview of Aristotle in “Essays ...” is interpreted as a detailed doctrine of fate as the principle of the existence of specific things in the world.
2nd edition, corrected