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.

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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