The indispensable and unreliable Diogenes Laertius

Our chronicler of classical philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, a source at once indispensable and unreliable, deserves one more blog post from us. This is so that we can settle the account between Laertius and Zeno of Elea.

I earlier quoted a passage from the Book Six in which there is an account of Diogenes of Sinope and juxtaposition of two observations his biographer namesake attributes to him. "A man once proved to him syllogistically that he has horns, so he put his hand to his forehead and said, 'I do not see them.' And in a similar manner he replied to one who had been asserting that there was no such thing as motion, by getting up and walking away."

As we've discussed, the sophism of the "horns" arose in the context of Stoicism, and its preference for the hypothetical syllogism rather than the categorical syllogism beloved by Aristotle.

The denial of motion is famously due to one Zeno of Elea, although it takes Laertius a looong time to get around to Zeno, and even longer to get back to that denial.

We get there in Book Nine, about the "promiscuous" philosophers, so called because Laertius says they are "spoken of promiscuously in connection with no particular school." It is a "miscellaneous" bin of a chapter, then. The section there explicitly devoted to Zeno of Elea is brief, mostly political (our Eleatic had a run-in with an obscure ruler called Nearches the Tyrant) and doesn't mention the impossibility of motion at all. We get a random statement that he is said to be "the first man to ask the question called Achilles." Then we move on in one-thing-after-another fashion, with no notion about WHAT that question was, nothing about the turtle!

We circle back to motion only several black-letter 'promiscuous' philosophers later, when we are ostensibly talking about Pyrhho the skeptic.

Our chronicler in that chapter oddly tries to retcon Zeno of Elea into the mould of Pyrhho. So we get back to motion.

"And Zeno endeavors to put an end to the doctrine of motion by saying: 'The object moved does not move either in the place in which it is or in that in which it is not.'"

Then, frustratingly, we as readers must (no pun intended) move on.

That was a quick reference, then, to Zeno's 'arrow'. The general idea, as we know especially from Aristotle, is that for an arrow to move it must be moving at some moment in time. But it is always where it is! So when can it be moving? Aristotle of course thought such arguments against motion unavailing but he presented them much more fully that this tidbit!

Why was that with Pyrhho and Pyrhhonistic skepticism? This is the oddest thing about this Laertian scatter-shot treatment of Zeno. We are teased that he had an argument about motion then delivered a bit of it but only in the context of thinkers who thought that knowledge is impossible and we might as well learn to live with our ignorance.

I, for one, entirely believe Aristotle (and Simplicius and Proclus) got Zeno right and Laertius is a bungler.

Zeno was defending Parmenidean monism. That is a dogmatic position, not a skeptical one. I gather that Pyrhho doubted motion, as he doubted everything -- that was his bag. But Zeno wasn't doubting motion. He was denying it. He was offering us the "red pill" about motion.

That is different.

A Story About Coleridge

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Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

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Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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