Editorial This special issue of Ancient Philosophy Today: Dialogoi concerns Presocratic metaphysics. The aim of Dialogoi is to consider the contemporary relevance of ancient texts, and the fragmentary and enigmatic writing of these early Greek philosophers might seem a strange place to look for insight into contemporary issues. But as the authors of the manuscripts in this volume show, there are many riches in these texts of great value to us today. Why should we continue to study these eldest of philosophical texts at all? They are, to be sure, quite distant from us; but this distance proves to be a resource, as we find in these early Greek philosophers a fundamentally different way of thinking than that to which we are accustomed. This thinking is not burdened with such modern suppositions as that of the original, fundamentally isolated individual who must emerge from a pre-societal ‘state of nature’ only for her own self-interested protection, the view of private, internal thought as the ground of certainty surrounded by an uncertain external world, or – perhaps more controversially! – the univocal and ontologically selfsufficient sense of ‘existence’ in philosophical systems with a Latinate vocabulary. Instead of individuation, separation, and self-sufficiency, the early Greek thinkers began from an interest in the most basic causal principles in which all material beings share and that unite the beings in some meaningful sense. These, of course, are the well-known ‘first principles’ and ‘primary causes’ first sought by Thales and those that followed, whose interest in a commonly shared causal principle became the source from which Western philosophy emerged. Perhaps we can learn something today by thinking of original and fundamental principles not in the modern sense of individuated separation, but Ancient Philosophy Today: DIALOGOI 3.1 (2021): 1–2 DOI: 10.3366/anph.2021.0039 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/anph 2 Ancient Philosophy Today: DIALOGOI instead from the ancient sense of shared, principal causes in and through which materiality is grounded. Each author here provides an occasion to return to these early sources afresh. One central figure receiving extensive attention is Heraclitus, who has been of significant interest since antiquity and, as these authors show, presently offers new directions for metaphysical research. Richard Neels, Jessica Elbert Decker, and Keith Begley each develop accounts of themes like the unity of opposites, cosmic poiesis, and metaphysical co-composition that help us to recover and begin to apply this notoriously obscure and endlessly provocative thinking to a set of current issues in our era of naïve paratactic metaphysics. The other authors, conversely, turn attention to lesser-studied figures to find important but neglected concepts therein. Luca Dondoni considers the underappreciated Diogenes of Apollonia, the later Milesian with Eleatic influence who, on Dondoni’s reading, offers an entirely materialist alternative to Anaxagorean panpsychism with contemporary appeal. Andrew Payne, meanwhile, discusses Archytas, the Pythagorean scientist roughly contemporaneous with Plato, developing an account of the view of definition we find when considering objects not with respect to their isolation from all others, but instead their situatedness within a network of constitutive relations. I am very honoured to have been given the opportunity to contribute to this exciting young journal in the capacity of Guest Editor. In addition to the authors of these papers, I give many thanks to Editors Anna Marmodoro and Erasmus Mayr, and the journal’s Editorial Assistant. On their behalf and my own, I would like to thank everyone at Edinburgh University Press, and particularly John Watson, Sarah MacDonald, Fran Affleck, Ruth Campbell, Duncan James, Carol Lonie, Teri Williams, and Rebecca Wojturska. We thank Udit Bery for overseeing the book reviews, as well as reviewers Guus Eelink and Paolo Fait. We finally must give special thanks to our exceedingly generous submission referees, who must unfortunately remain anonymous. I do hope that these essays on the Presocratics lead to further discussion. They show that, despite two-and-a-half millennia of commentary, these eldest of philosophical texts have not been exhausted. Moreover, we see that these texts remain as valuable today as ever in helping us to think through contemporary problems from a surprisingly fresh perspective. Colin C. Smith Guest Editor University of Colorado, Boulder