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This chapter talks about a significant re-appropriation of mainstream Cyrenaic ethics: Walter Pater's “new Cyrenaicism.” It suggests that Pater casts light on four elements that remain obscure in ancient Cyrenaic doxography: “unitemporal pleasure,” the relation of hedonism to traditional virtues, the economy of pleasures and pains, and the Cyrenaic argument against the fear of death. The chapter also argues that the narrative framework of Pater's novel communicates how and why Cyrenaicism could attract someone better than arid doxography ever could. Cyrenaic ethics arises from the interaction of particular individuals' pre-philosophical inclinations with critical reasoning, and develops through the dynamic interaction of these two elements with the satisfying or dissatisfying feedback from experience.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the history and methodology of “doxography” as the deeply problematic means by which Presocratic texts have been transmitted and passed down to us.It highlights the importance of Diogenes Laertius, as one of the most brilliant early doxographers, and the ground-breakingDoxographiGraeci of the nineteenth century German classical scholar and philologist, Herman Diels.Like the sophists, Lacan questions the primacy of truth in both philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse, which is “relegated to the lowly status it deserves.”

The examination of perception that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla undertake in the Compendium and its Commentary draws from a centuries long and rich history of philosophical debate. This chapter reviews some of the most important aspects of this debate, while at the same time providing a thorough examination of the overall scope and content of their works. It argues for the need to view the encyclopaedic pursuits of Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla both in doxographical terms, and as an effort aimed at establishing the core Buddhist metaphysical principles on a sound epistemological foundation. Finally, by mapping the ontological and epistemological domains of Buddhist and Indian philosophy, the chapter also invokes the principle of clarity and a version of Okham’s razor to defend the parsimonious epistemology of the Buddhists.

Scientific discovery requires not only that one correctly explain phenomena, but that one persuade one’s peers. Anaxagoras’ theory was accepted by Empedocles, Diogenes of Apollonia, and even Philolaus (who had a radically different model of the heavens), and apparently Democritus. The doxographic tradition shows a mixture of different theories competing with heliophotism and antiphraxis. But when errors are corrected and the theories are put in chronological order (as they are not in doxographies), we see that there were virtually no new theories of lunar light and eclipses proposed after the time of Anaxagoras. Indeed, Aristotle himself uses antiphraxis as a paradigm of successful scientific explanation–even though it fits poorly with his own model of the heavens. Mathematical astronomers from Aristarchus to Ptolemy adopted heliophotism as an axiom and antiphraxis as a theorem. No competing hypothesis was even considered from the time of Ptolemy to the present day.

Ancient Greeks and Romans confronted the need to select and store information, with a view to subsequent retrieval. A number of textual formats were used to store, organise and permit retrieval of various sorts of information. This chapter argues that certain types of texts (including doxographies, or collections of opinions) provided an archival function for studying topics and issues in scientific fields such as natural philosophy and medicine, allowing the accumulation, organisation, retrieval and use of data and ideas. Considering the functions of these and related texts can shape our understanding of ancient Greek and Roman scholarly and investigative methods. A crucial feature of doxographical texts is their archiving of already-produced opinions about nature, rather than ‘raw data’. In some cases, as Aristotle and others noted, we have to work with opinions because of a lack of data. One aim of doxography, as an ancient archiving text, is to allow the philosophical and scientific work of hypothesizing and explaining to proceed. It is perhaps only in later periods that ancient doxography becomes a repository of what had been selected to endure as archives of past philosophical and scientific enterprises, rather than as material to be mined for active scientific projects.

The introduction (to the book) contextualizes the life and work of Rog Bande Sherab within Tibetan intellectual history. It also contextualizes the work translated in this book, The Lamp of the Teachings, within the history of Tibetan literature, especially as a historical and doxographical work.

Physics I is a well-constructed logos. It aims at knowledge of the principles of physical change: it establishes that there are such principles and determines what they are and how many. Even if the results are general, its theories are fundamental for the entire Aristotelian study of the natural world. This introduction reconstructs the general structure of Physics I and its connection to Physics II. It distinguishes four stages in Physics I: an introduction, a doxographical section in which Aristotle is in dialogue with previous philosophers, a section in which he solves the main puzzles about change, and an endoxical confirmation of the theory established in the preceding section. Other points discussed are: to what kind of public Physics I is addressed, the difference between Aristotle’s theory and ancient cosmologies, the examples he uses, how to identify a single event, and his conception of essences.

This article shows how two basic meanings of psuchē—namely, ‘breath’ and ‘life’—may have helped Platonizing, or for that matter Stoicizing, doxographers in endowing various Preplatonic philosophers with the view that the world is ‘ensouled'. Although I do not attempt a systematic reconstruction of how these cosmo-philosophers conceived the relationship between the world and what was to become ‘the soul’, I suggest that framing the problem in terms of ‘breath’ and ‘life’ helps us to arrive at a more adequate understanding both of the authentic evidence and of the history of its reception. Indeed, to the extent that it is possible I try to reconstruct the interpretative steps that led, with various degrees of legitimacy, from the original wording to its Platonizing or Stoicizing deformations, which remain all too often the framework of analysis in modern interpretations. Five case studies are considered: Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, some Pythagoreans, and Alcmaeon.

Historians of philosophy (such as Hegel, Hadot, Cooper, among others) tend to marginalize the ancient Cynics as philosophically uninteresting, and moreover as irrelevant for a proper understanding of the sense in which philosophy in antiquity used to be a way of life. To be sure, the Cynics lived very distinctive and unconventional lives, but whatever it was that they were doing, it cannot have been—so the historians claim—a conduct rooted in philosophical reason and argument. This paper first musters the grounds typically given for this kind of deflationary view and then proceeds to examine the sparse but nevertheless suggestive evidence about ancient Cynicism that the (predominantly Stoic) doxographical tradition handed down to us. In the end, it comes to a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to the prevailing opinion of the cynics as inconsequential non-philosophers.

Chapter 1 takes up the question of the origins of the early Christian heresy catalogue. If the earliest followers of Jesus did not make use of this polemical genre, where then did it come from? Scholars often point to the Greek doxographic or “tenet writing” tradition as the literary forerunner of the Christian heresy catalogue. Yet although heresy catalogues resemble lists of philosophers and philosophical views in form, they function quite differently. Therefore, this chapter directs attention away from doxographies, to an earlier group of Christian writings composed in the name of the apostle Paul. The anonymous authors who produced texts like the Pastoral Epistles, the Epistle to the Laodiceans, and the Apocryphal Correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians initiated important shifts in the ways that Christians conceived of their opponents and thus paved the way for the introduction of the heresy catalogue a generation later.