1/1/2023 0 Comments Diogenes the dog![]() ![]() None of Diogenes' work has survived in a complete form. ![]() It is notable chiefly because "here we can read at first hand what in the case of the other Presocratics we learn only indirectly: an attempt to describe in scientific detail the structure and organization of the physical world." Works It contains a description of the distribution of the blood vessels in the human body. The longest surviving fragment of Diogenes is that which is inserted by Aristotle in the third book of his History of Animals. Among his other doctrines, he is said to have believed that there was an infinite number of worlds, and infinite void that air, densified and rarefied, produced the different worlds that nothing was produced from nothing, or was reduced to nothing that the Earth was round, supported in the middle, and had received its shape from the whirling round of the warm vapours, and its concretion and hardening from cold. The nature of the universe is air, limitless and eternal, from which, as it condenses and rarefies and changes its properties, the other forms come into being. And there is not a single thing which does not share in it. For it is this which seems to me to be god and to have reached everything and to arrange everything and to be in everything. This he modified by the theories of his contemporary Anaxagoras, and asserted that air, the primal force, was intelligent:Īnd it seems to me that that which possessed thought is what people call air, and that by this everyone both is governed and has power over everything. Air ĭiogenes, like Anaximenes, believed air to be the one source of all being, and all other substances to be derived from it by condensation and rarefaction. He does not appear to have been influenced by the Atomists. As a material monist, he synthesized the work of earlier monists such as Anaximenes and Heraclitus with the pluralism of Anaxagoras and Empedocles and argued that air was a divine cosmic ordering principle that he also equated with intelligence. Like all the physiologoi (natural philosophers), he wrote in the Ionic dialect.ĭiogenes is characterized by Theophrastus as the last of the "physiologoi" or natural philosophers. Diogenes Laërtius states that "great jealousy nearly put his life in danger in Athens," but there may be confusion with Anaxagoras who is mentioned in the same passage. Nothing is known of the events in his life, except that he lived some time in Athens. Diogenes was a native of the Milesian colony Apollonia Pontica in Thrace, present-day Sozopol on the Black Sea. ![]()
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