Because it is active and eternal, it can also be considered a god.ĭiogenes continued by arguing that the basic stuff must be intelligent. Yet it is not a passive substrate, but is "strong" and determines how things are formed from it and return to it (DK, B8, B7). Apparent things exist for a limited time, whereas the basic stuff is "an eternal and deathless body" (DK, B7). Therefore, the four elements and the other types of matter of our world must have differentiated from the same primordial stuff, must retain their underlying identity, and must ultimately return to what they differentiated from (Diels and Kranz, B2). He argued that if the proper nature of apparently different types of matter were not the same, then these different types of matter could not causally interact with one another, and we could not explain such phenomena as the nutrition and growth of living organisms, in which apparently different types of matter transform into each other. Diogenes, on the contrary, returned to the monism of his Ionian predecessors. Most of the pre-Socratic philosophers working after Parmenides adopted a pluralist ontology. Diogenes' philosophical doctrine has three prominent aspects: his monism, the teleological traits in his cosmology, and his theory of cognition. Theophrastus listed Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Anaximenes as the main influences on Diogenes, and to this list we should certainly add Heraclitus. His philosophy was termed "eclectic" already by Theophrastus, and most modern commentators agree with this assessment. His work had an effect in Athenian intellectual life toward the end of the fifth century BCE, and his influence is detectable also in some treatises of the Hippocratic corpus and in the Stoic doctrine of pneuma (literally breath in Stoic philosophy, the mixture of the two active elements, fire and air, and the sustaining cause of all bodies.) All the existing fragments seem to come from On Nature. It has been debated whether he wrote only one book called, in English, On Nature or, as Simplicius reported (in On Aristotle's "Physics" 151, 20), four ( On Nature, Meteorology, On the Nature of Man, Against the Sophists ). Nothing is known for certain about his life. around 440 –430 BCE.) His native town was either Apollonia on Crete or, more probably, Apollonia on the Pontus. See Ionian' School.Diogenes of Apollonia was a Greek philosopher belonging to the last generation of the pre-Socratics (fl. Panzerbieter, Diogenes Apolloniates (1830), with philosophical dissertation J. Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, i. His most important work was 11Epi cuo ew ( De natura), of which considerable fragments are extant (chiefly in Simplicius) it is possible that he wrote also Against the Sophists and On the Nature of Man, to which the well-known fragment about the veins would belong possibly these discussions were subdivisions of his great work.įragments in F. The air as the origin of all things is necessarily an eternal, imperishable substance, but as soul it is also necessarily endowed with consciousness." In fact, he belonged to the old Ionian school, whose doctrines he modified by the theories of his contemporary Anaxagoras, although he avoided his dualism. His chief advance upon the doctrines of Anaximenes is that he asserted air, the primal force, to be possessed of intelligence- "the air which stirred within him not only prompted, but instructed. Like Anaximenes, he believed air to be the one source of all being, and all other substances to be derived from it by condensation and rarefaction. The views of Diogenes are transferred in the Clouds (264 ff.) of Aristophanes to Socrates. There seems no doubt that he lived some time at Athens, where it is said that he became so unpopular (probably owing to his supposed atheistical opinions) that his life was in danger. Although of Dorian stock, he wrote in the Ionic dialect, like all the physiologi (physical philosophers). 460 B.C.), Greek natural philosopher, was a native of Apollonia in Crete.
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