Starting from the Solon-Croesus episode, this chapter argues that Herodotus’ inquiry establishes a horizon of expectation in which historical memory (through the narratives of Tellus and Cleobis and Biton) opens up a new space for philosophical knowledge. The second half of the chapter suggests that the Histories’ generic affiliation with history over philosophy is anachronistic in the fifth century BCE. It demonstrates that Herodotus was not interpreted as a historian in his own time and that "inquiry" and "love of wisdom" characterize the dynamic and highly experimental intellectual culture of this period.

During the fifth and fourth centuries bce, a number of Greek doctors attempted to base the art of healing on the first principles of all things in general. These “cosmological doctors” included such thinkers as Eryximachus, Philistion, Petron, the unnamed opponents of On Ancient Medicine, and the authors of On the Nature of the Human Being, On Breaths, On Flesh, and On Regimen. Previous studies have approached these thinkers under the rubric of medicine's interactions with “philosophy.” This book, by contrast, will approach them from a medical point of view, arguing that the best way to understand these systems is to view them as responses to preexisting modes of medical thinking.

Extraordinary individuals in ancient Greece claimed to know the real meaning of names. They understood "real meaning" to be the theological and cosmological truths hidden in language. Although the truths were plural and there was no consensus about what true names ultimately reveal, the theoretical assumptions of those individuals were essentially similar: they believed that language in general, but more specifically the names of the gods, contained crucial information about the cosmos. Classicists tend to think that those views were already present in archaic hexametric poetry and further developed centuries later by philosophers, sophists, and religious innovators of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. But did Greek philosophies of language and the semantics of divine names effectively develop in isolation? The present book explores points of contact between Greek and Mesopotamian systems of thinking about language and reality and argues for the importance of bringing into a dialogue cuneiform and Greek texts concerned with the cosmic function of language.

Chapter 3 studies the beginnings of Greek historiography against the background of the intentional history described in the first two chapters. This clearly shows the innovative character of the new genre. The decisive factor for this was the influence of the new philosophical thinking that had initially developed in Ionia. The emphasis on rational procedures and the search for true knowledge was in the foreground, coupled with the curiosity of the researcher. The numerous stories of the Greeks were critically questioned by intellectuals of this provenance (e.g., Xenophanes, Hecataeus). Herodotus also felt obliged to the new rational-philosophical method, but at the same time he integrated many of the traditional stories into his new type of historical work. The critical direction then culminates in Thucydides, who in his own way and with the logic of power connects the present and the past. He was only too aware that he had strayed very far from traditional views of the past, and he himself underscored it very clearly.