The Thinkery

A concise history of the intellectual culture of High Classical Greece and the emergence of ideas as a public pursuit.

From the years just before Socrates’s birth to shortly after his death (469–399 BCE), ancient Greece witnessed an extraordinary surge of philosophical, artistic, and scientific activity. Sometimes called a Greek Enlightenment, this period produced some of history’s most influential minds. In The Thinkery, Christopher Moore offers a vivid history of the vibrant intellectual culture they helped create.

Bringing together a wealth of sources, including depictions of Athens’s intellectual culture by the likes of Aristophanes and Plato, Moore traces a web of interconnected ideas, philosophers, dramatists, and teachers. The book takes both its structure and its title from Aristophanes’s Clouds, which lampoons a fictional school run by Socrates called a phrontistêrion, or “thinkery,” while offering an insider’s view of the intellectual practices and controversies of the time. Moore brings to life figures such as Euripides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Protagoras, Gorgias, and, of course, Socrates, showing how they debated the nature of reality and our capacity to know; cosmology and astronomy; the best form of government; divine involvement in the world; ethics, law, and the good life; and the possibilities of education.

Throughout, Moore traces the emergence and consolidation of a new understanding of what it meant to be an intellectual. In this period, intellectuals emerged as people committed to a life of reflection not just on issues of practical importance but also on ideas, interesting in their own right. Rich and probing, The Thinkery offers a fresh account of the first known public thinkers and sheds new light on the self-consciously intellectual culture of ancient Greece.