How does it help us to know that Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, liked figs? And it’s not even clear that his anecdotes always reveal much about the philosophy at issue. If you want rigorous historical accuracy and meticulously cited sources, look elsewhere. 334 –272) takes a contemplative walk far from the madding crowd (from Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy, 1655–61).ĭiogenes’ approach to philosophy has been alternately the object of passionate scorn and of devoted affection, according mostly to the fashions of the times and places in which the Lives have been read. Did they practice what they preached? How did that work out for them? The Stoics and the Epicureans and the Cynics talked a big game. The Lives presents its subjects as complete individuals, whose philosophical outlook was bound up with their personalities and whose truest teaching was revealed by their lives. The details of Miller’s translation are given under Further Reading. “Diogenes seems… to assume that a vignette or a telling anecdote may reveal more about the essential character of a philosopher than the canonic writings that generations have intensively studied,” writes James Miller. That’s almost the whole point of the Lives: it’s a collection of biographical sketches and philosophical doctrines, a survey not just of philosophical schools but of the kinds of people who founded and attended them. He himself would probably have thought it did. He may have been from Nicaea, in what is now Turkey. It is generally thought that he lived and wrote in the early 3 rd century AD. We know next to nothing about the life of the man who wrote Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. It’s ironic that Diogenes Laertius, biographer extraordinaire, had no biographer of his own.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |