Reddit reviews Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin Classics)

OK, you're asking this specifically in a Greek context, so here goes a Greek-centric answer.

The list of "philosophers who might have inspired Socrates" is a fairly substantial list. First off, there's the semi-legendary "Seven Sages" (Kleoboulos, Solon, Thales, and so on), who served as popular icons of wisdom. Of these, we know more about Solon than any of the others; he seems to have been an extraordinarily influential figure in early 6th-century Athens, as he is known not only for his ethical wisdom but also for his political adeptness. The Athenians attributed several features of their political structures and justice system to him, and there are stories about him wandering around the world and meetings with famous people.

But there were many other so-called "pre-Socratics" with whose ideas Plato and Socrates engaged, such as Herakleitos, Anaximandros, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Parmenides, Zeno, and Empedokles (alternative spellings: Heraclitus, Anaximander, Empedocles). Their ideas are far too variegated to boil down to a sound-bite. There are a few common themes though: the search for the substance(s) of which the cosmos is ultimately composed; demystifying the natural world; problematising phenomena that seem trivial or simple at first glance; the difficult relationship between universals and particulars. (Plato engaged particularly with the first and fourth of these; Socrates may have done so as well, but it's easiest to associate him with the third.)

Sadly none of their works survive complete, though large chunks of Parmenides On nature survive. The surviving fragments are easily accessible in the excellent Penguin edition of Early Greek Philosophy by Jonathan Barnes. For further reading around, you could try the Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy; alternatively, if you're looking at how this fits into the broader picture, you could do worse than read Part I of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, or even the first few chapters of Jostein Gaarder's novel Sophie's World.

The idea of philosophical writing doesn't originate in any one place, though. Many of the pre-Socratics wrote in verse (with the important exception of Herakleitos), and so they fit into a literary tradition as well as a philosophical one. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that philosophy, in its origins, was an offshoot of a genre of poetry that we now call "wisdom literature". Hesiod's Works and Days is an important paradigm for the genre, and there are other known examples like the pseudo-Hesiodic Precepts of Cheiron, Bird Omens, and Astronomy. Wisdom literature, in its turn, wasn't a Greek invention but goes back to early Near Eastern roots, with many parallels in Hittite, Babylonian, and Hebrew culture. This literary tradition was very influential on Solon and Parmenides, and some other poets like Theognis, who isn't normally regarded as a philosopher. Plato, too, treated philosophy at least partly as a literary thing -- the relationship between philosophy and poetry is a key theme for him, and comes up very strongly, in different ways, in the Republic and the Symposium -- but not specifically poetic; he seems to have drawn his literary inspiration more from the very public- and community-oriented genre of Athenian drama, rather than from poets like Hesiod and Theognis, whose works were more at home in a symposiac context.

this is a fantastic and comprehensive broad survey of greek history from the bronze age to the hellenistic age: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/he/subject/ClassicalStudies/AncientHistory/AncientGreekHistoryGreekCiviliza/?view=usa&ci=9780195372359

this is a good collection of primary sources writing specifically on philosophy which includes a lot of interesting ancient writing on science: http://www.amazon.com/Early-Greek-Philosophy-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140448152

Early Greek Philosophy is a pretty decent introduction to PreSocratics. Plato's dialogues, particularly early ones like The Apology are pretty approachable.

There's also a Podcast on Ancient Philosophy

Man that is a tall order! I'd first pick out an era (ancient, medieval, or modern) and go from there.

Going in chronological order, Penguin has a pretty great book of Pre-Socratic philosophy:

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Greek-Philosophy-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140448152

The only problem is that the works are fairly fragmentary, sometimes even sentences are cut in half. AFAIK we don't have a coherent book of Western philosophy until Plato.

The gang is doing The Republic right now, which is about as political a work as you can get. It's worth digging into unconventional interpretations of the book, I really enjoyed this as a guide to thinking about Plato and others without giving you a specific reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Between-Lines-History-Esoteric/dp/022647917X

I haven't read Aristotle but his Politics and Nichomachean Ethics show up on a lot of reading lists.

It's sort of a post-Socratic pre-Socratic book, but I really enjoyed Lucretius' De Natura Rerum. Basically he puts his own spin on the philosophy of Epicurus and renders it in Latin poetry. Roman philosophers are more about sharing life wisdom than doing rigorous logic, but you might check out Cicero and Seneca on the earlier side and Boethius and Marcus Aurelius on the later side.

Medieval philosophy basically equates to religious philosophy. You mentioned Augustine and Aquinas, also check out Maimonides ("the Jewish Aquinas"). I haven't studied these guys too closely.

Modern political philosophy starts with Machiavelli and runs through Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Burke, Mill, and Marx. On the epistemology side there's Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer. Not to spoil anything for you, but a popular interpretation is that Marx and Nietzsche basically killed the entire Enlightenment project. In any event it definitely helps to have a grounding in both ancient and modern philosophy before tackling Nietzsche so that you know what he's talking about and responding to.

Oh yeah and Hobbes wrote a sequel to Leviathan called Behemoth where he analyzed the English Civil War using his political principles. Wasn't as popular as the original though!

Yes all the Platonic dialogues are worth reading with the possible exception of Menexenus, which is just Socrates essentially quoting someone. Not bad for historians I suppose.

My own fascination in philosophy mostly centres around the 19th century, and those philosophers who came before Socrates. May I humbly suggest this book about the Pre-Socratics for after you'e read more Plato? I found it incredibly worthwhile.

The 19th century to me is a fascinating time for philosophy and intellectually in general. I love the literature of the time, and many of the currents of thought going on (idealism, the "proto-existentialists", the political philosophies, transcendentalism, the natural sciences, etc.) For me, there is a definite high watermark in creative and intellectual expression from about the mid 19th century to the Great Depression, and then something changes.

From this period I would recommend Nietzche and Kierkegaard, though it really depends where your greatest interest lies (metaphysics? epistemology? ethics? politics? economics?). For me those two are utterly indispensable, and the crowning achievement of philosophy since Descartes, though there are many other worthy figures who you should get to know as well.