diogenes laertius lives of eminent philosophers loeb

#Diogenes laertius lives of eminent philosophers loeb full

If the original book was published in multiple volumes then this reprint is of only one volume, not the whole set. Fold-outs, if any, are not part of the book.

As this print on demand book is reprinted from a very old book, there could be some missing or flawed pages, but we always try to make the book as complete as possible. Each page is checked manually before printing. Illustrations, Index, if any, are included in black and white. This is NOT a retyped or an ocr'd reprint. NO changes have been made to the original text. Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden leaf printing on spine. In any given passage he is as useful and reliable as the source he happens to be quoting at that exact moment.ĭiogenes arranged his work as follows.LeatherBound. Much of this quoted material is trivial, merely amusing, or probably false but some of it is very valuable. Richard Hope counted 1,186 explicit references to 365 books by about 250 authors, as well as more than 350 anonymous references: that is, an average of nearly three references to a page of the Oxford Classical Text edition. Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy for Diogenes is a veritable tissue of quotations from all sorts of authors and on most conceivable, and some inconceivable, aspects of philosophers’ lives. The use of Diogenes as the skeleton for histories of ancient philosophy passed away gradually in modern times, but his name still appears often in footnotes, as in W. In the late Middle Ages Diogenes’ book was already the basis of what then passed for history of philosophy, as we see from such a work as the very popular and widely distributed De vita et moribus philosophorum of Walter Burley (1275–?1345). “Philosophers’ Lives,” which, since it emphasizes the biographical aspect of the work, more truly represents Diogenes’ interest.ĭiogenes has acquired an importance out of all proportion to his merits because the loss of many primary sources and of the earlier secondary compilations has accidentally left him the chief continuous source for the history of Greek philosophy.

Citations usually shorten the title to such a form as φιλοσόφων βίοι, Philosophy and Succinct Collection of the Doctrines Acceptable to Each School”). The title of Diogenes’ work appears in the mss. His own personality is as elusive as that of a florilegium yet much can be learned about his interests and the tastes of his audience by observing the types of material that he chose to include. The rather motley, fluctuating impression produced by Diogenes’ book as a whole derives, not particularly from his own personality, but from the huge and variegated mass of source materials that he transmits to us. 3-12, where he unexpectedly rises to a passionate defence of Epicurus, which may, to be sure, have come from Epicurean sources. Diogenes seldom expresses any personal opinion on a philosophical matter, and then he does so without heat except at x.

The cross references backwards and forwards are almost all correct. There are numbers of first-person references in Diogenes, but they are surprisingly unrevealing: the majority of them merely state how he adjusted the source materials that were available to him by finding other information, as in ii.

#Diogenes laertius lives of eminent philosophers loeb full

a If he gives a full account of Sceptic doctrines and carries the succession of that school later than of any other, it is probably because he enjoyed juggling paradoxes, the more outrageous, the better. Of his work as a whole suits better a man of the world who happened to be interested in philosophers, but more as men and writers than as philosophers in a technical sense.