Ebook: The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory

This is the first English translation of Hans Blumenberg’s The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory, complete with new endnote annotations and a new critical afterword by the translator. In this book, Blumenberg discusses the history and function of an anecdote found in Plato’s Theaetetus dialogue. According to the anecdote, the early astronomer and proto-philosopher Thales of Miletus is walking while focused on observing the stars and tumbles down a well that he failed to notice in his path. A Thracian servant girl laughs and comments that he sought to understand what was above him when he did not even know what was right in front of him.
Variants of this story recur in texts by Diogenes Laertius, Church Fathers Tertullian and Eusebius, medieval and Renaissance-era preachers, Enlightenment figures Voltaire, Montaigne, Bacon, and Kant, and later by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Blumenberg’s own colleagues. Some of these philosophers sympathize with Thales’ ambitions while others chastise his negligence. Whatever position they take on the story, Blumenberg suggests that it stands in for the unknowable history leading up to the attitude known as “theory.” By retelling the anecdote, philosophers reveal their distinctive values regarding absorption in curiosity, philosophy’s past, and the demand that theorists abide by sanctioned methods and procedures.
In this work and others, Blumenberg demonstrates that European intellectual history’s most cherished images and anecdotes have proven indispensable not as fixed ideas, but as metaphors, that is, as representations whose meanings remain indefinite and invite frequent reinterpretation.