Book Reviews R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Caz6, editors. The Cynics: The Cynic Move- merit in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, x996. Pp. ix + 456. Cloth, $55.oo. The ancient philosophical biographer, Diogenes Laertius, included the Cynics in his array of philosophical schools despite their loose organization and lack of fixed doc- trine. He begins Book Six of his Lives of the Philosophers with the Socratic Antisthenes, lavishes more than half the book on Diogenes of Sinope, (...) includes minor figures such as Monimus and Onesicritus, tells us most of what we know about Crates of Thebes, his wife Hipparchia and her brother Metrocles, and concludes with short entries on Menippus and Menedemus. This only takes Cynicism down to the third century B.C., a point which marks the beginning of a slight lull in its visibility. But as this comprehensive and.. (shrink)

The article confronts one of the ἄποpοι λόγοι discussed in ancient Eristic-Stoic logic: the famous “cuckold” (κερατίνης), where an interrogator has his respondent to admit to have been or still be cuckolded. The source of the problem is a principle of dialectics related to the principle of the excluded-middle according to which a question admits only a positive or a negative answer. To the question “Have you ceased to be cuckolded?” both answers seem to presuppose that the respondent has been (...) cuckolded. To solve the problem one can either deny the dialectical principle of the excluded-middle or (as Stoic logic does) introduce the idea that negation refers not simply to the predicate (as in Aristotelian logic) but to the entire proposition (by denying the existence of the subject, for example). (shrink)

The article confronts one of the ἄποpοι λόγοι discussed in ancient Eristic-Stoic logic: the famous “cuckold” (κερατίνης), where an interrogator has his respondent to admit to have been or still be cuckolded. The source of the problem is a principle of dialectics related to the principle of the excluded-middle according to which a question admits only a positive or a negative answer. To the question “Have you ceased to be cuckolded?” both answers seem to presuppose that the respondent has been (...) cuckolded. To solve the problem one can either deny the dialectical principle of the excluded-middle or (as Stoic logic does) introduce the idea that negation refers not simply to the predicate (as in Aristotelian logic) but to the entire proposition (by denying the existence of the subject, for example). (shrink)