Antithenes

Antithenes: if one is going to claim any familiarity with the Platonic moment in philosophy, with the moment that produced but did not yet contain Cynicism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonism, one needs to know the name Antithenes. 

He was one of Socrates' followers, and so of very much the same philosophic milieu as Plato. 

But Antithenes went the other way on the issue of universals. He may even be said to be the founder of nominalism, saying thing like, "A horse I can see, but horsehood I cannot see." 

Too little in known about him.  We do know, though, that the later Cynics claimed him as a spirit kindred to their own. They would tell a story of Diogenes of Sinope, as a young man, following Antithenes around to bask in his wisdom.

This tale seems unlikely.  It was invented to give the Cynics a sort of apostolic succession from Socrates, who by Diogenes' day was seen as the gold standard of philosophical greatness by a number of distinct factions. Socrates to Antithenes to Diogenes, with the latter finally answering those questions that Socrates had been too persistent in asking. 

Whether there existed the personal linkage that story suggests or not, the Cynics may well have taken from Antithenes the nominalistic position on universals. It fits nicely, after all, with Diogenes' defining defiance of conventional values: rejecting notions of propriety and of happiness as an unreasonably high valuation of mere words. 

Heck, Diogenes's legendary "search for an honest man," with the help of his lantern, as portrayed above is customarily misinterpreted in our times.  It doesn't mean that he valued honesty and thought it worth finding. Rather, the stunt with the lantern demonstrated that he thought honesty, like other conventional values, merely a word, NOT a tangible fact of the sort one can see with a lantern. In Antithenesian terms, Diogenes thought of honesty as more akin to horseness than to a good old particular horse! 

To use a 21st century idiom, we might say that the legendary lantern "threw some shade." 

Something to think about as we settle into a new year.