Diogenes

Article

Diogenes is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 23, 2021 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Diogenes’ more reasonable outlook that, … we know what men are”; “In the tradition of Diogenes, he’s never held a formal academic job”. It most often appears alongside Plato, 2008 crisis, @the_megabase.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 23, 2021
  • Last seen: May 15, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

March 23, 2021 · Original source
This section is also interesting for its "Fat Tony Debates Socrates" chapter, where Fat Tony argues that putting Socrates to death was reasonable, because Socrates was claiming everything must be comprehensible (ie if Euthyphro couldn't come up with an academic-style formal verbal account of what "good" was, then it was somehow embarrassing that he was trying to be good) whereas formal systems are fragile and people should be okay relying on intuition and heuristics. Cf. Plato's attempt to define man as a featherless biped, vs. Diogenes' more reasonable outlook that, f*@k you, we know what men are, trying to reduce it to words is dumb and counterproductive."
May 15, 2024 · Original source
Pearce isn’t a philosophy professor. He dropped out of Oxford partway through undergrad - you can read more about why in his What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher interview. In the tradition of Diogenes, he’s never held a formal academic job or really any job at all; he says he supports himself primarily through buying and selling domain names.