The Beginning of Greece Philosophy: between Orality and Literacy

This contribution pretends to offer an outline of the general background in which Greek philosophy was born, considering especially the coexistence of the oral tradition with the alphabetic writing introduced in Greece. Accordingly, the first section of this paper is devoted to explain in detail some of the consequences entailed by the oral tradition, as it was the main form of transmission and production of knowledge, in the way it shaped the archaic Greek mind. The second section shows the effects that the introduction of alphabetic writing to Greece had on the cognitive processes and, as a result of it, on the ancient Greek world picture. On the basis of such premises, a final comment will be made about the coexistence in the Greece of the oral tradition with writing as it was used for transmitting specialized information, and order to underline the importance of language and of the way it is manifested for the development of the cognitive processes.