12. Philosophy and Theosophy

GA 246/1908-08-17/p005 ·1908-08-17 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach zum Teil bruchstückhaften Mitschriften» (From transcripts that are in part fragmentary). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 246), which also speaks of "fragmentarischen Hörernotizen und Vortragszusammenfassungen". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

However, some more recent historians of philosophy, who wanted to be particularly complete and particularly clever, have shifted the beginning of philosophy to even earlier times and drawn in all sorts of things from earlier wisdom teachings. But this all arose from a very specific form of dilettantism, which is unaware that everything that preceded wisdom teachings in India, Egypt and Chaldea also has a completely different methodological origin than purely philosophical thinking, which tends towards the speculative. This only developed in the Greek world; and the first to come into consideration is really Thales. We do not even need to begin a characterization of the various Greek philosophers from Thales, not from Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Anaximenes, nor from Socrates and Plato; we can start immediately with the personality who actually stands first and foremost as the philosopher catexochen, and that is Aristotle.

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Cite: GA 246/1908-08-17/p005 · edition English