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 Antithene...
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In the period of Near-Eastern history beginning with the conquests of Alexander, there were by the standard accounts that have come down to us four great schools of philosophy: the cynic, the stoic, the epicurean, and the skeptic. Each of the first three of these four may be defined by a clear conception of the ideal life. For the fourth, the ideal life is more of an unspoken implication. For the cynic, the ideal was renunciation. For the stoic, indifference. For the epicurean, a sort of sustainable low-intensity pleasure. For the skeptic, it was the bursting of balloons, a ruthless honesty about the fact that no one (else) knows what they think they know. There was a distinction between the Academic and the Pyrrhonistic variants of skepticism, but in both cases the underlying glee seems to have been the same, the conviction that most people in the world have minds full of balloons, hot and airy ideas easily burst by sharpened logical arguments. What fun!
The riots in France seem to have accomplished their purpose. The next time someone tells you, "violence never settles anything" you can respond, "on earth, it settles almost everything that ever gets settled." [Okay, that's an opposition of the saccharine with the cynical.] On December 1st alone (perhaps the peak of the rioting) more than 100 cars were burned in Paris, and the Arc de Triomphe was vandalized. The city's mayor estimated property damages at more than 3 million euros. On December 4, the prime minister said of the carbon taxes that had catalyzed this response, "no tax deserves to endanger the unity of the nation." The government has backed off the implementation of the new taxes. So that was "settled." So if your interlocutor insists on getting an example, that one is near at hand. As a bit of comic relief in this story, the US psychopath in chief, Donald J. Trump, tweeted that the crowd was chanting "We wan...