In the room and fiddled with their definition to improve it. As if they didn’t know they were being made fun of, they looked up from the chicken On the other hand the philosophers in the Academy keep their dignity. After all Diogenes is right that a plucked chicken is a biped and has no feathersĪnd so disproves the Academy’s definition. Now in print The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 ArgumentsĪn anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, published by Liveright.ĭiogenes gets the better of the plucked chicken exchange it sounds, in fact, like a story that later Cynic philosophers circulated. Pumpkin” - a joke at Plato’s expense, no doubt, but a joke that made fun of the enterprise of classification and definition and therefore tells us that enterprise was under way at the Academy. According to a comedy written in Plato’s time, students trained by defining “the The anecdote also tells us that philosophers at this institution had a project to complete. This is the side of philosophy that tries to systematize knowledge. The anecdote suggests an institution at which some people were teachers and others learned from them, and became philosophers by virtue of having learnedįrom authorities. Of him, a name synonymous with “school”). We associate Plato’s name with the Academy, the name of the gymnasium at which he founded his school (and later, because This anecdote alone points to several differences between the two ideas of philosophizing. They represent two ancient ideas of what a philosopher should be. And stories like the one about the plucked bird bring the two together for a starkĬontrast. Plato himself called Diogenes “a maddened Socrates,”Īnd if there’s praise in that description it is grudging praise even so it puts Diogenes somewhere in the Socratic legacy. If he never met Socrates, he knew philosophers who had. But there was already a divergenceīetween two ways of being a philosopher long before - in the generation after Socrates - and two kinds of inspiration that Socrates represented for the philosophers who lived after him.ĭiogenes of Sinope, better known as “Diogenes the Cynic,” considered himself Socratic. That argued philosophy ceased to be what Socrates had made of it sometime around the late 19 century, when it became professionalized within the institution of the modern university. Recently Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle wrote a column for The Stone, “ When Philosophy Lost its Way,” It represents philosophers as always having belonged to two very different types and it’s worth remembering how far back the division goes. This story is widely told, and not just because it has a punch line. They were philosophers in action, notable for existing rather than for their accounts of existence. Cynics like Diogenes behaved not as the authors of theories but as performers of wisdom.

Diogenes stories