Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  2 For versio Aristippi, see Dorandi, Laertiana, 201–22; and Ricklin, “Vorsokratiker in lateinischen Mittelalter,” 111–29. For editions of Jeremiah of Montagnone, see “Epytoma sapientie”: Incipit compendium moralium notabilium compositum per Hieremian iudicem de Montagnone civen Paduanum (Venice, 1505); and of Pseudo-Burley, see H. Knust, Gualteri Burlaei liber de vita et moribus philosophorum (Tübingen, 1886); and J. O. Stigall, “The De vita et moribus philosophorum of Walter Burley: An Edition with Introduction” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 1956). On the manuscripts of Pseudo-Burley and the history of the text, see the articles of J. Prelog, “Die Handschriften und Drucke von Walter Burleys Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum,” Codices Manuscripti 9 (1983): 1–18; “Zur Bewertung der Textzeugen von Walter Burleys Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 20 (1985): 164–83; and “‘De Pictagora phylosopho’: Die Biographie des Pythagoras in dem Walter Burley zugeschriebenen Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum,” Medioevo 16 (1990): 190–251.

  3 Currently Laurentianus 69.35, siglum H.

  4 Leopoldo Puncuh, “Carteggio di Pileo de Marini, arcivescovo di Genova (1400–1429),” in Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria 11, no. 1 (1971): 139–40.

  5 Ibid., 164.

  6 This is according to a letter that Traversari sent May 27, 1425 (Epistolarium 6.23) to Leonardo Giustiniani, the humanist and Venetian statesman (c. 1383–1446).

  7 See the letter from Traversari to Giovanni Aurispa (1376–1459) dated July 19, 1425.

  8 Marzia Pontone, Ambrogio Traversari monaco e umanista: Fra scrittura latina e scrittura greca (Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2010).

  9 It is necessary to devote a serious work to a new modern critical edition of the versio Ambrosiana, based on Traversari’s autograph and on the Greek witness Ambrose was able to consult, in particular the Laurentianus 65.39 and other exemplars that could have been in his possession for however long. The edition of the Letter to Menoeceus by Epicurus (10.122–35) that Gigante first published on the basis of Traversari’s original and Michele’s copy gives a concrete and encouraging idea of the breakthroughs that await us. The result will not only be an edition of the versio Ambrosiana penned by the Calmadolese friar, but also a Latin text on which one will be able to base investigations when searching for a more precise identification of the codex by Antonio di Massa, the one by Giustiniani, and eventually the codex by Aurispa hypothesized by Knoepfler.

  Diogenes Laertius and the Pre-Socratics

  André Laks

  The notion of a Pre-Socratic period in philosophy has its roots in antiquity. Plato in his Apology and Xenophon in his Memorabilia both insisted that Socrates had had nothing to do with the type of impious cosmological speculation with which thinkers before Socrates had been widely associated. In a famous passage, Cicero said that Socrates “had brought back philosophy from the sky to the earth.” In spite of these important antecedents, the idea of the “Pre-Socratics” is undeniably a modern creation. The expression “Pre-Socratic philosophy” first occurs, as far as we know, in a handbook on the history of philosophy published by J.-A. Eberhardt in 1788.

  Although there was general agreement by then that a decisive break in the history of philosophy had taken place sometime before Aristotle, there was debate in the nineteenth century about where this break occurred—with Socrates, or Plato? This debate, which also raised the question of how the Sophists should be evaluated and classified, involved great philosophers such as Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Nietzsche (who all had strong theories of history), as well as great historians of philosophy, such as E. Zeller and H. Diels. If the notion of a school of “Pre-Socratic philosophers” eventually superseded that of “Pre-Platonic philosophers,” this was due to the conjunction of Nietzsche’s mature view of Socrates as the beginning of decadent modernity and Diels’s widely read collection of Pre-Socratic material, published in 1903 under the title Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics). The implication was that there existed a single line of philosophical development in ancient Greece, with Socrates as the pivotal figure, demarcating a “before” and an “after.”

  This modern conception of the history of philosophy contrasts with the account we find in Diogenes Laertius. Consider the following passage from the Prologue of his book (1.13–15):

  But philosophy has two origins, one that dates back to Anaximander, the other to Pythagoras. Anaximander was a student of Thales; Pythagoras studied with Pherecydes. The school originated by Anaximander was called Ionian because Thales, who as a native of Miletus was Ionian, was Anaximander’s teacher. The other school was called Italian, after Pythagoras, who practiced philosophy for the most part in Italy. [14] The one school, the Ionian, ends with Clitomachus, Chrysippus, and Theophrastus; the Italian with Epicurus. The succession passes from Thales through Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, to Socrates, who introduced moral philosophy; from Socrates to the various Socratics, especially Plato, who founded the Old Academy; from Plato through Speusippus and Xenocrates; to Polemon, Crantor, Crates, and Arcesilaus, who founded the Middle Academy, to Lacydes, who founded the New Academy, Carneades, and Clitomachus. And thus it ends with Clitomachus. [15] It ends with Chrysippus in the following way: from Socrates it passes to Antisthenes, then to Diogenes the Cynic, Crates of Thebes, Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus. It ends with Theophrastus as follows: from Plato it passes to Aristotle, and from Aristotle to Theophrastus. And in this way the school of Ionia comes to an end.

  The succession of the Italian school is as follows: from Pherecydes it passes to Pythagoras, then to his son Telauges, then to Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Leucippus, and Democritus, who had many students, among whom one should mention Nausiphanes and {Naucydes}, who taught Epicurus.

  This passage, which announces the overall structure of the Lives, assumes that Greek philosophy can be divided into two parallel but distinct traditions, which flourished in two different regions of ancient Greece, one in Ionia in the East, the other in Italy and Sicily in the West. Accordingly, the “Ionian succession” occupies one part of the work (Books 2 to 7), while the “Italian succession” takes up another (Books 8 to 10).

  One immediate conclusion is a negative one: Diogenes Laertius recognizes no “Pre-Socratics” in the modern sense. This is true in two related respects: first, the various philosophers we used to gather under this name do not constitute an autonomous group for Diogenes; and second, each of the successions forms a continuous whole, without any mention of a decisive break into before and after. What we get in Diogenes is not two segments on a single line, but two independent and continuous lines.

  There is some emphasis, in the “Ionian” lineage, on Socrates as “the “first to discourse about the conduct of life” (a characterization repeated in the section dedicated to him [2.20]). Yet this was hardly conceived as a deep caesura. Plato’s Phaedo skillfully, almost diabolically, managed to integrate Socrates’ early rejection of natural philosophy with a narrative that depicted the mature Socrates as engaged in an inquiry about the causes of generation and corruption (96a). Plato thus paved the way for the unbroken presentation Aristotle made of his predecessors in the first book of his Metaphysics. In Book 5 of his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero also presented the history of philosophy as a continuous one, treating its subject as essentially of a practical nature. Socrates’ abandonment of the study of the sky to concentrate on human affairs only meant the renewal, he suggested, of an older conception of philosophy as primarily a form of political wisdom aimed at legislative knowledge.

  Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero all had their own reasons to portray Socrates’ interest in ethical and political questions as a rejection of natural science: at worst, an interest in cosmology could provoke suspicions of impiety (Plato and Xenophon); at best, it distracted attention from the more important question of how best to shape the conduct of human life (Cicero).

  But the Socratic interest in ethics could
also be read as simply taking an important step toward the completion of a philosophical program according to which philosophy is a complex discipline including a number of subdisciplines, including both ethics and physics.

  In Diogenes Laertius, the sense of a continuity between Socrates, despite the novelty of his approach, and his predecessors is made manifest by the construction of Archelaus—a pupil of Anaxagoras who is also said to have been Socrates’ teacher—as an intermediary between “physics” and “ethics.” Archelaus, Diogenes writes at 2.16, “seems also to have touched upon ethics. For he discussed laws and goodness and justice…. Archelaus held that … the just and the shameful exist not by nature, but by convention.” The implication is clearly that Socrates, for all his originality, simply focused on an aspect of philosophy that was already well established.

  ***

  From this point of view, one could venture to say that Diogenes Laertius is Aristotle’s true heir: for Aristotle’s story of the development of philosophy, in Book A of the Metaphysics, also subordinates the ethical orientation of Socrates’ thought to the longue durée of a philosophical inquiry about the first causes and principles that, according to Aristotle, had begun with Thales (Metaphysics 1.3). Indeed, there are striking similarities in the treatment of Socrates in Diogenes and in Aristotle. For Diogenes, Archelaus had already broached the ethical questions that Socrates pursued, as we have just seen; for Aristotle, Socrates’ focus on ethics is no more than a generational and hence an almost contingent feature: what Socrates is primarily interested in is in fact an epistemological problem, the question of definition (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 1.642a28–31).

  A further important similarity between the two, which also is a difference from Diels’s Fragmente der Vosokratiker, is that the Sophists are excluded from their histories of philosophy (with the exception of Protagoras). It may be significant that Philostratus, a near contemporary of Diogenes, devoted a book specifically to The Lives of the Sophists, as if the two works were complementary. In any case, a number of modern collections of Pre-Socratic philosophers also leave the Sophists aside.

  ***

  The differences between Diogenes and Aristotle are even more telling than the similarities. Aristotle recounted one continuous, if complex, history of philosophy; his account assumes that what is developing, thanks to the efforts of successive generations of philosophers, is a systematic field of conceptual inquiry, and that this mode of inquiry is teleologically oriented.

  Diogenes’ continuity boils down to institutional succession; from a conceptual point of view, there is no discernible system at all. The “opinions” of philosophers are simply “what they happen to think”—“what they approve of” because it so “pleases” them (Greek ta areskonta; Latin placita); they are, more than anything, an aspect of their “lives.” What interests Diogenes is not the construction of philosophy itself sub specie aeternitatis (or rather sub specie Aristotelis) but the display of individual philosophers adorned with individual doctrines. Paradoxically enough, Aristotle himself, because he dedicated so much attention to chronological questions and even to questions of personal character, can be considered as providing the remote origin of this orientation: the model of “succession,” on which Diogenes Laertius relies, most probably originated two centuries before him with a certain Sotion, who is usually presented as a Peripatetic scholar.

  Still, as a historian of philosophy, Aristotle towers above Diogenes. The latter lacks conceptual depth—so much so that it is not clear he is interested in “philosophy” as Aristotle understood it at all. His presentation of the difference between the Ionian and Italian traditions is purely geographical; he never considers that the two might be correlated with two distinctive philosophical orientations, such as the religious orientation of the Italian philosophers and the naturalism of the Ionians. There is no notion in Diogenes Laertius that geography determines ways of thinking. His two parallel stories, the one that leads from Thales to the Stoics, and the other that leads from Pythagoras to Epicurus, simply coexist. This is particularly strange since the geographical criterion becomes insignificant early on, with the concentration of all the philosophical schools in Athens. (According to Diogenes Laertius, the first to transport philosophy to Athens was Archelaus [2.16]; other sources say it was Anaxagoras.)

  ***

  Thus, if one looks for “our” Pre-Socratic philosophers in Diogenes Laertius, one will find them cut off from one another. First, there is Book 1, which is entirely devoted to the Seven Sages: in principle, Diogenes distinguishes them from the philosophers, although there is an interesting hesitation in this respect about the most famous of them, Thales of Miletus. In the Prologue, as we have seen above, Thales is the founder of the Ionian tradition of philosophy; in Book 1, however he is the first of the Sages.

  In Book 2, Diogenes presents four more “Pre-Socratic” philosophers—Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, and Archelaus—before turning to Socrates. Most of the rest of our Pre-Socratics appear toward the end of the work, in Book 8, which is entirely devoted to Pythagoras and his successors (Empedocles, Epicharmus, Archytas, Alcmeon, Hippasus, Philolaus) and in Book 9 (Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno of Elea, Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia).

  In this latter book, we encounter yet another change with respect to the succession announced in the Prologue: Xenophanes, although he still precedes Parmenides, is now coupled with Heraclitus; both are presented as two isolated (“scattered”) figures who, each for different reasons, cannot be integrated into either the Ionian or Italian genealogy (cf. 8.50 and 91). The reasons for this are clear enough in the case of Heraclitus, whose name, oddly but typically, was not mentioned at all in Book 1: according to a well-established tradition which in part relies on one of his own declarations, Heraclitus was a haughty philosopher who had no personal disciples and, above all, no teacher (cf. 9.5). Matters are less clear for Xenophanes, who does feature as Parmenides’ master in the Prologue. One can speculate that the construction of an “Eleatic” sub-filiation, in the wake of Plato’s Sophist (242d), on the basis of Xenophanes’ interest in “the one” god, which made him a forerunner of Parmenides’ “one” being, was felt by some to conflict with his alleged Skepticism (which Diogenes himself denies at 9.20; see also 9.72). He thus became a candidate to join Heraclitus as an anomaly. (It is interesting that the section on Parmenides presents Xenophanes as only one of his possible masters [9.21].)

  ***

  Diogenes was until the late eighteenth century the great model for historians of philosophy: this is because his project is historical rather than conceptual; because its chronological scope is much more extended than Aristotle’s could ever be (it includes the Hellenistic schools); and because it contains much more material and information (whatever its nature and quality may be) than survive in Aristotle’s extant treatises.

  But with the emergence of new historical approaches and conceptions of history at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Diogenes became something of an embarrassment. Hegel’s judgment about the respective value of Aristotle and Diogenes in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy is harsh—and representative: “Aristotle is our most abundant authority; he studied the older philosophers expressly and most thoroughly, and he has, in the beginning of his Metaphysics especially, and also to a large extent elsewhere, dealt with them in historical order: he is as philosophic as erudite, and we may rely upon him. We can do no better in Greek philosophy than study the first book of his Metaphysics.”1 By contrast, “The book of Diogenes Laertius is an important compilation, and yet it brings forward copious evidence without much discrimination. A philosophic spirit cannot be ascribed to it; it rambles about amongst bad anecdotes extraneous to the matter in hand. For the lives of philosophers, and here and there for their tenets, it is useful.”2

  There are good reasons to subscribe to Hegel’s judgment, but possible ways around it: Diogenes’ very weaknesses can also be converted i
nto a powerful instrument directed against any purely conceptual view of the history of philosophy. Nietzsche is the most prominent representative of this more positive attitude to Diogenes Laertius.

  Precisely because Diogenes was as interested in the lives of his philosophers as in their thinking, he could be read as opening the way to a reflection on philosophy’s status: the traditional title of this book, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, thus becomes more than a description of its actual content: it names, at a second, reflexive level, an important philosophical problem—that of the relation between doctrine and life.

  This aspect, which was important for Jacob Burckhardt’s analysis of the relation between philosophy and culture in his History of Greek Culture, also played an important role in Nietzsche’s philosophical promotion of the “Pre-Socratics.” For according to Nietzsche (who had initially relied, in his lectures at the University of Basel, on the expression “Pre-Platonic philosophers”), Socratic ethics had done more than redirect the course of philosophy: it had affected the course of humanity at large by breaking with a formerly “tragic” worldview in favor of a moral optimism that laid the ground for the development of Christianity, democracy, and socialism.

  The Pre-Socratics thus became crucial for sketching the outlines of a tragic form of philosophy. This was why it was important to understand who these great figures were. And Diogenes could help here. In a famous section of Human, All Too Human entitled “The tyrants of the spirit,” Nietzsche writes, “Aristotle especially seems to have no eyes in his head whenever he stands before these men”—he mentions Thales, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus. “And so it seems as though these glorious philosophers had lived in vain, or as though their only function had been to prepare the way for the quarrelsome and loquacious hordes of the Socratic schools.”3 Diogenes Laertius, by contrast, because of the kind of material he preserved, was an invaluable resource, if what was at stake was retrieving the Pre-Socratics’ original greatness and status within Greek culture.