Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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 aro...

I regaled you last week with a couple of simple points from a book written in the early 200s of the Common Era, Diogenes Laertius' LIVES AND OPINIONS.  The two points were these: Socrates was taught by a philosopher named Archelaus, who was a philosopher of nature in the manner of the Ionians. Separately, Socrates may have been a dramatist, who assisted in writing some of the works normally attributed to Euripides. If accepted as true (I don't think they are -- I have read a fair amount of discussion of Socrates without encountering ether of them) -- but IF accepted as true, do they change our understanding of the Athenian Enlightenment in any important way? Well ... perhaps. One of the bromides of Socrates scholarship is that before his time philosophy was about Nature writ large, the essence of the Cosmos. (Is everything water? is it air? fire? atoms? something else?). Through Socrates, philosophy came to encompass also a microcosm, the human soul and its virtues and vices. ...

  I've been reading Diogenes Laertius' LIVES AND OPINIONS.  Considered as a piece of writing, it is a terrible job. It is just one thing after another. "Another story told about X is that Q1 happened to him.  But according to some sources, it was Q2 that really happened.  And according to others, Q1 really happened to Y instead. Yet another thing said about X is... Here are three brief poems attributed to X." Considered as a source on events of ancient times, that anti-stylistic formlessness is presumably its value. Laertius isn't inserting his own grand design into his account of lives and opinions of classical Greek philosophers. He is just passing along what he has heard. As to Socrates, [and yes that is the cliched image of Socrates above, the David painting], Laertius has heard at least two things that I hadn't encountered in any other source, and that seem intriguing: Socrates was taught by a philosopher named Archelaus, who was a philosopher of nature i...

  I am thinking of Poisedon, pictured here, in connection with a famous quote of Epicurus, often set forward by atheists in our day as an example of a problem that (in their view) afflicts theists. The quote offers a trilemma, a menu of three unpalatable possibilities. David Hume weighed in, quoting a classic author: "Epicurus' old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? The he is malevolent. Is he both able  and willing? Whence then is evil?" There is no surviving text of Epicurus saying some Greek equivalent of this. The near-contemporary biographers like Diogenes Laertius did not quote him saying it.  Where did Hume get it?  He was presumably summarizing the words from a Christian writer, circa 300 AD, named Lactantius.  Lactantius was actually an advisor to Constantine, so he was there as Christianity became THE official religion.    Apparently  the new o...