In my thesis, I explore the complex relationship between mythos and logos in ancient Greek philosophy. Through a historical outline of some of the more prominent theories of myth, I first try to show that mythos cannot be spoken of as a simple collection of erroneous stories and that the terms themselves originally carried quite different meanings from those used in later periods. An important role in this transformation was played by the emergence of the city-states (polis), in the context of which Greek thought witnessed the gradual decline of certain forms of mythic consciousness and the emergence of new approaches to knowledge, among them philosophy. Through an understanding of the ambivalent mythos/logos relationship in the thought of Homer and Hesiod, the first philosophers of physis, the Sophists and, finally, Plato and Aristotle, I seek to show that ancient Greek philosophy did not make the so-called transition “from mythos to logos” in its entirety or in the way that is usually understood as the supremacy of rational thought.
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