He had a reputation for sleeping and eating wherever he chose in a highly non-traditional fashion and took to toughening himself against nature. He used his simple lifestyle and behavior to criticize the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt, confused society. He begged for a living and often slept in a large ceramic jar, or pithos, in the marketplace. No writings of Diogenes survive, but there are some details of his life from anecdotes ( chreia), especially from Diogenes Laërtius' book Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers and some other sources. There he passed his philosophy of Cynicism to Crates, who taught it to Zeno of Citium, who fashioned it into the school of Stoicism, one of the most enduring schools of Greek philosophy. Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold into slavery, eventually settling in Corinth. There are many tales about him following Antisthenes and becoming his "faithful hound". After his hasty departure from Sinope he moved to Athens where he proceeded to criticize many conventions of Athens of that day. He was the son of the mintmaster of Sinope, and there is some debate as to whether or not he alone had debased the Sinopian currency, whether his father had done this, or whether they had both done it. He was allegedly banished, or fled from, Sinope for debasement of currency. He was born in Sinope, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia in 412 or 404 BC and died at Corinth in 323 BC. Baltimore, 1948.Diogenes ( / d aɪ ˈ ɒ dʒ ɪ n iː z/ dy- OJ-in-eez Ancient Greek: Διογένης, romanized: Diogénēs ), also known as Diogenes the Cynic ( Διογένης ὁ Κυνικός, Diogénēs ho Kynikós) or Diogenes of Sinope, was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynicism. Bibliography works on diogenes of sinopeĬr önert, W. See also Antisthenes Cynics Diogenes Laertius Hellenistic Thought Plato Zeno of Citium. Diogenes sought to make any man king, not of others, but of himself, through autonomy of will, and his own life was his main philosophical demonstration to this end. His famous remark that he was a citizen of the world is more probably antinational than international, for he was concerned with the individual rather than the community. He is credited with tragedies illustrating the human predicament and with a Republic, which influenced Zeno the Stoic, that was notorious for its scandalous attack on convention. Some exaggeration here is due to the "dog-cynic" shamelessness pedagogically employed to discount convention, and some is no doubt inherent in the uncompromising extremes of Diogenes' doctrines. Since for Diogenes virtue was revealed in practice and not in theoretical analysis or argument, the stories of, for example, his embracing statues in winter and his peering with a lantern in daytime for a human being, the tales of his fearless biting repartee and criticism of notables such as Alexander, however embroidered or apocryphal, correctly reflect his pointed teaching methods, which encouraged the development of a new didactic form, the chreia, or moral epigram. The anecdotes illustrate Diogenes' philosophy in action. But doxographic traces (for example, Diogenes La ërtius, VI.70 –73) and, indeed, the tradition as a whole presuppose a serious teacher who, in disillusioned protest against a corrupt society and hostile world, advocated happiness as self-realization and self-mastery in an inner spiritual freedom from all wants except the bare natural minimum and who, in a bitter crusade against the corrupting influence of pleasure, desire, and luxury, extolled the drastic painful effort involved in the mental and physical training for the achievement of a natural and inviolable self-sufficiency. It is not easy to recover the philosopher from, on the one hand, the lurid fog of anecdotal tradition that represents the stunts of an eccentric tramp at Athens and Corinth defacing conventional human standards -as he or his father, Hicesias, was supposed to have defaced in some way the currency of Sinope -or, on the other, the idealized legend that grew after his death. Tradition held that on coming to Athens in exile, he was influenced by Antisthenes' teaching Diogenes' ascetic distortion of Socratic temperance gives some point to Plato's supposed remark that he was a "Socrates gone mad." Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in the fourth century BCE, was the prototype of the Cynics, who probably were so called from Diogenes' Greek nickname, the Dog ( kuon adjective form, kunikos ).
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