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Looking for Theophrastus by Laura Beatty
£12.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781838954383
Published:
02 May 2024
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
352 pages
Dimensions:
198x129x25mm
Weight:
0.303kgs
Author:
Standing on the deck of a ferry boat, Laura Beatty watches as the assembled port and buildings of mainland Greece disappear from view. Her destination is Lesbos, but she's not only travelling across the stretch of glittering blue sea - she's also travelling 2000 years into the past, to a time when the world was a wild place of gods and warrior kings. It's here she needs to go to retrieve a forgotten philosopher, one who worked side-by-side with Aristotle to learn and to classify the world, to rely on his senses rather than myth to explain what governs the seasons and the soil, to put down on parchment the glorious multiplicity of character types he met on his travels across ancient Greece.
Who is Theophrastus, and why should we care?
Once, 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?
This 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.
Against 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.
About the Author: Laura Beatty is the author of two novels, two biographies and a genre-defying book (part travel, part memoir, part fiction) about a road trip across Europe. Her first novel, Pollard, won the Authors' Club First Novel Award as well as being shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. She lives in Bath.
| Number of pages | 352 |
|---|
We will despatch your order as quickly as we can. If, for whatever reason, a product is out of stock we will contact you to discuss the likely delivery time or an alternative product.
| First Item | 2 Items & Over | |
|---|---|---|
| UK | £3.75 | £5.00 |
| EU | £15.00 | £30.00 |
| USA & Canada | £30.00 | £50.00 |
| Rest of the World | £45.00 | £60.00 |
| Collect in Store | free | free |
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