Since the influential edition by H. Diels [1], the term 'Presocratics' usually refers to a very diverse group of Greek thinkers. Not all of them lived before Socrates [2] (some of them - such as the Sophists, Democritus [1] and Philolaus [2] - were his contemporaries), but they were all not (yet) influenced by his thought (cf. [2. VIII]). The popularity of the term arose under the influence of Nietzsche, who had stopped using the term 'Preplatonic philosophers' [3].
Although the term 'Presocratic philosophers' (from which the shorter 'Presocratics' is deriv…