Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

The Other Greek Philosophers

How To Be A Cynic

Roger Caldwell contemplates the life and thinking of Diogenes the Dog.

Diogenes the Cynic (c.412-c.323 BCE) lives on in folk-memory as the ancient Greek philosopher who lived in a barrel (actually a kind of storage-jar), and who supposedly told Alexander the Great to move out of his sun. In his own time his fame was such that Aristotle in his work on rhetoric could refer to him simply as ‘the Cynic’ without need of further identification. For Plato he was ‘Socrates gone mad’, on account of his having taken Socrates’ simple way of life to extremes.

…