Reader's Digest: June 17, 2023

In recent reading, I caught up with the joyfully provocative (and so well-named) Ted Gioia, whose latest chapter of Music to the Raise the Dead looks at the origins of Western thought and finds not theory, or stand-up, but musical performance: Parmenides versifying in the meter of the bards; Empedocles anticipating Earth, Wind & Fire (but adding water)…

Today, … [Empedocles] is presented as a prototype of the natural philosopher and physical scientist. But what students aren’t told is that he was a singer as well as a philosopher, and composed his works in this same hexameter associated with Orphic hymns and divine oracles.

… not to mention Socrates at the end of Plato’s Phaedo:

The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: Make and cultivate music, said the dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was only intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which has always been the pursuit…