Month: July 2021

Per Diogenes Laertius, Xenophon was an Athenian from the Erchia deme. He was a modest man and reportedly handsome, as well. He was about four decades Socrates’s junior. The two men first met in an alley when Socrates blocked Xenophon’s path. He asked Xenophon if he knew where men can…

Diogenes Laertius says that Socrates was the son of a stone mason and a midwife (Socrates later associated himself with midwifery in Plato’s Theaetetus as a metaphor for his eristic activities). Diogenes says Socrates was a student of Archelaus, the first man to bring philosophy westward from Miletus in Ionia…

Per Diogenes Laertius, Anaxagoras was a native of Clazomenae, an Ionian city near Smyrna in present-day Turkey. He was a student of Anaximenes. He descended from a noble family and lived off an inheritance. He focused his energies on studying nature, never troubling himself with the affairs of the city….

Anaximenes hailed from Miletus and was a student of Anaximander (according to Diogenes Laertius the Milesian school began with Thales). Bringing together ideas from both Anaximander and Thales, Anaximenes held that air is the first principle of all things yet he also maintained Anaximander’s concept of the “unlimited.” He also…