ABSTRACT Much of the second part of Cornford’s Principium Sapientiae is a review of cosmological myths throughout the world. Cornford did not live to write up the grander conclusions toward which he was working. This article argues that Cornford’s narrative was intended to culminate in an account of the origins and significance of two general metaphysical approaches, which came to dominate Greek philosophy and the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Cosmological myth according to which differentiation arises from an undifferentiated origin (as found in Hesiod’s Theogony, the first account of Genesis minus the theism!, and in many other sources) offers one way of thinking of reality. Multiplicity arises organically and freely from a primal source where the multiple elements do not yet exist as such. Top-down creation myths, such as that of Hesiod and the second account of creation in Genesis, are, according to Cornford, of later origin, reflective of the emergence of an authoritative patriarchy in the societies in which they arose. Metaphysical accounts of reality can, generally speaking, be grouped into those for which emergence is central and those for which stability is central. Cornford isolated the roots of both in pre-philosophical Greek thought, and its Asian antecedents.
Owen M. Goldin (Fri,) studied this question.