What is Philosophy? Diogenes Laërtius’ Answer

Aug 1, 2024 by

By Robert Lazu Kmita, European Conservative.

If we wish to understand what philosophy is, we must investigate the world in which this word was born, namely ancient Greece. Beyond the philological and etymological approaches, which, while valuable, have their limitations, we must find out how classical authors understood the notion of ‘philosophy.’ Alongside the great speculative thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, from whom we have substantial collections of texts, there is an author who discussed in detail the origins of ‘love-of-wisdom’: Diogenes Laërtius. In the most famous collection regarding ancient philosophers and their doctrines, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Vitae philosophorum), he dedicates the first pages to a detailed analysis of the origins of philosophy.

Unfortunately, due to the harsh criticism brought against him by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Hermann Usener (1834-1905), Laërtius has often been ignored or treated with some reserve. The accusation made by these two was that of plagiarism. Specifically, he was alleged to have copied entire sections from the writings of Diocles of Magnesia, Apollonides of Nicaea, or Favorinus. Considering how accounts about the ancient Greek philosophers were circulated and borrowed, such criticisms are unjustified. Ancient authors did not live in a world marked by the modern ethical principle of the ‘rights of the author.’ What was important for them, as seen from their writings, was the completeness of the information transmitted, collected haphazardly from sources either mentioned or left obscure. They were driven by the desire to record everything that had been said about the ancient lovers-of-wisdom, without concerning themselves with consistency, contradictions among different sources, or the authorship of these accounts.

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In the Dictionnaire des Religions, whose first edition was published by the French publisher Plon in Paris in 1990, Ioan Petru Culianu unequivocally stated that “in the Platonic tradition, philosophy is a religion and religion a philosophy.” After more than 30 years of research, I have come to the conclusion that this statement is applicable to all of Greek philosophy. Ancient speculative thought cannot be separated from the specific horizon of the religions professed by its main representatives.

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