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I can talk the leg off a chair
Posts: 487
Quaero hominem - "search for a human being".
Subtracting a star from Making of Modern Cynicism for being deliberately impenetrable. What a wanker. This is of course referring to Diogenes famous anecdote of walking through the market in broad daylight with a lit lamp in search of a human being. That term took some serious digging to find - but once the meaning is established, an otherwise confusing passage in the book becomes clear. WANKER. This is typhos you WANKER - deliberate befuddling of clarity. WANKER.
On the bright side, Diogenes' Sayings and Anecdotes: With Other Popular Moralists arrived yesterday. This is only just released by Oxford University Press. In a word - wonderful. This is in the "must have" category.
Virtually all of the original Cynic writings and records have been obliterated - all that remains are small seeds of anecdote and aphorism scattered to the winds. There has never been a systemic effort to collate all the fragments in the one place in a coherent manner. This book does exactly that - it has sifted through all available literature to date and extracted the verified seeds and catalogued them by context and history. It not only lists all of the surviving scraps, but also all of the variants that have mutated. Superb. In fact, if you are new to the world of Cynicism, this is probably the very best place to start.
When someone chided Diogenes on seeing him come out of a brothel, he said, "What's the matter then? Should I have been coming out of your house?"
Reason is overrated
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I can talk the leg off a chair
Posts: 487
Reason is overrated
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I can talk the leg off a chair
Posts: 487
OK, you can now classify Goad as a hypersensitive pussy too. On the basis of upstream comments, he has blocked the TOA twitter account from his feed. Go figure. The last few threads of respect are now gone. He may be the very antithesis of PZ Myers, but he shares the exact same of his worst traits. Sycophants only, criticism is forbidden.
"World's bravest man". Indeed. Dunning-Krugerite with hyper-sensitive feelings underneath all the bullshit. What a shame.
Post last edited May 28th
Reason is overrated
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Moderator
Posts: 55
He's spying on other sites to see what's being said about him? Can't take criticism?
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I can talk the leg off a chair
Posts: 487
Dallas Gaytheist -
He's spying on other sites to see what's being said about him? Can't take criticism?
Looks like it. It's starting to look like a pudgy pink Merkin thing.
Reason is overrated
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Moderator
Posts: 55
Cynic "defacing" was just as radical in religious matters. In the first place, they stood the traditional hierarchy of beings on its head: the series animal–man–god was transformed into man–animal–god. For man, as a being of desire and anguish, animal and god constituted, respectively, the concrete and the theoretical model of self-sufficiency and indifference, and consequently of happiness. This does not mean, however, that the Cynics were pious. They had no interest in religious questions, and considered god as a mere theoretical reference point. In general, one can say that their attitude toward religion was skeptical or agnostic: they preferred not to pronounce judgment upon questions that transcended their understanding. Although they viewed man as confronted by an irrational world, constrained to bend to the whims of Fortune, they refused to live in constant fear of the gods and the punishments of Hades. This, more-over, is why they envied animals, which they considered happy for lacking any idea of a god who can reward and punish. Such viewpoints, combined with scathing criticisms of anthropomorphism, the Mysteries, prayer, the interpretation of dreams, ritual purifications, and other religious institutions, ran directly against traditional religious ideology.
-- Excerpt from The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, Edited by R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, p. 24.
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Moderator
Posts: 55
In Our Time: Cynicism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Cynics, the performance artists of philosophy. Eating live octopus with fresh lupins, performing intimate acts in public places and shouting at passers by from inside a barrel is behaviour not normally associated with philosophy. But the Cynics were different. They were determined to expose the meaninglessness of civilised life by action as well as by word. They slept rough, ate simply and gave their lectures in the market place. Perhaps surprisingly, their ideas and attitudes were immensely popular in the ancient world.
But how coherent was cynicism as a philosophy? What was its influence on literature and politics and is there any truth to the contention that Jesus himself was influenced by the Cynics?
With Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick; Miriam Griffin, Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford; John Moles, Professor of Latin, University of Newcastle.
Post last edited Jun 19th
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I can talk the leg off a chair
Posts: 487
Jesus being a Cynic with no belief in god(s) has as much evidence as any other theory. Jesus trashing the money changers in the temple is pure Cynic. There is also far more evidence of the jewish world being predominantly Greek, and not Roman, in influence at that time. Jesus being a Cynic does have traction.
Reason is overrated
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Moderator
Posts: 55
Want the shortest path to the good life? Try cynicism
ScienceDaily (Oct. 22, 2012) — Are cynics and happiness mutually exclusive? For modern cynics, perhaps. But for the ancient Cynics, not necessarily.
Research by the University of Cincinnati's Susan Prince shows that despite the historical perception of the ancient Cynics as harsh, street-corner prophets relentlessly condemning all passersby and decrying society's lack of virtue, these Greek philosophers, indirectly descended from Socratic teaching, weren't all doom and gloom. They actually might have espoused a shortcut to happiness.
"We don't have good scholarship on the Cynics. They're seen as misanthropes and as sloppy and dirty people who want to cut down the elite," says Prince, UC assistant professor of classics, adding, "But there's a positive strand that needs to be recovered, and I'm really going to punch that hard with my research."
Prince was invited to present her new research paper, "Antisthenes and the Short Route to Happiness," during the 13th annual Unisa Classics Colloquium hosted by the University of South Africa's Department of Classics and World Languages from Oct. 25-27 in Pretoria. More than a dozen presentations from international scholars will address the conference theme of "Ancient Routes to Happiness."
Much of Prince's work focuses on the individual believed to be the primary influence on the Cynic movement, Antisthenes.
Antisthenes was a pupil of Socrates and occasional rival of Plato. In fact, while history occasionally paints Plato as a philosopher of unequaled wisdom, UC's Prince says that through study of his texts, it's more plausible that he developed his ideas through tight intellectual debates with his contemporaries, and Antisthenes was among them. [Cuntinue reading here.]
Post last edited Nov 3rd
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Moderator
Posts: 55
Cynics
Cynicism originates in the philosophical schools of ancient Greece that claim a Socratic lineage. To call the Cynics a “school” though, immediately raises a difficulty for so unconventional and anti-theoretical a group. Their primary interests are ethical, but they conceive of ethics more as a way of living than as a doctrine in need of explication. As such askēsis—a Greek word meaning a kind of training of the self or practice—is fundamental. The Cynics, as well as the Stoics who followed them, characterize the Cynic way of life as a “shortcut to virtue” (see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 104 and Book 7, Chapter 122). Though they often suggest that they have discovered the quickest, and perhaps surest, path to the virtuous life, they recognize the difficulty of this route.
The colorfulness of the Cynic way of life presents certain problems. The triumph of the Cynic as a philosophical and literary character complicates discussions of the historical individuals, a complication further troubled by a lack of sources. The evidence regarding the Cynics is limited to apothegms, aphorisms, and ancient hearsay; none of the many Cynic texts have survived. The tradition records the tenets of Cynicism via their lives. It is through their practices, the selves and lives that they cultivated, that we come to know the particular Cynic ēthos.
Table of Contents
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History of the Name
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Major Figures and the Cynic Lineage
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Cynic Ethics
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Living in Accord with Nature and Opposing Conventions
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Freedom and Parrhēsia
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Training and Toughness
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Cosmopolitanism
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The Cynic Legacy
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References and Further Reading
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