The Missing End of the Threefold Cord in the Transmission of Ancient Skepticism into Modernity: The Lives by Diogenes Laertius

Abstract

The orthodox position regarding how ancient Skepticism first arrived in the Reinassance and later into Modernity has been dominated by the work of Charles B. Schmitt and Richard Popkin. They jointly defended what I call here “the Popkin/Schmitt thesis”: the transmission of skeptical ideas and arguments took place via a threefold cord made up of Cicero’s Academica, Sextus Empiricus’s Opera and Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers; in which the first two are dominant over the last one. This paper is intended to challenge this historical hypothesis through a twofold movement: on the one hand, I will argue that, from a historical perspective, unlike Cicero’s Academica and Sextus’s Opera, Diogenes’s Lives was one of the primary sources of ancient philosophy since the Middle Ages. I will also argue that, given its particular compositional features, Diogenes’s Lives transcended the philosophical context, influencing other branches of science like history and literature, through which Diogenes’s characterization of Skepticism became commonplace in the Western world. Furthermore, and from a philosophical perspective, I will argue that Diogenes’s version of Pyrrhonian Skepticism has some explanatory advantages that provide us with a more comprehensive image of it, one that is not centered on epistemological topics as in Sextus’s version. Both elements allow us to understand why Diogenes’s Lives has, by its own right, a central place among the Holy Trinity of texts responsible for the transmission of ancient Skepticism into Modernity.