Chronicle of Higher Education, 2002

An essay on the explosion of biographical studies of philosophers in the final two decades of the 20th century and the debate among philosophers about the philosophical significance of this "biographical turn"

Biography, 2004

Monastic Education in Late Antiquity, ed. Lillian Larsen & Samuel Rubenson (forthcoming), 2018

Ancient biographical literature was born out of the philosophical developments and inter-scholastic rivalries of classical and Hellenistic Greece. The proliferation of biographies in late antiquity suggests that a similar competitive atmosphere gripped the philosophical field. The rise of monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. introduced a new class of subjects for biographical literature that both challenged and stood in continuity with previous paradigms, mainly philosophers. In this paper, I treat the Religious History by the Syrian bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus and the Proclus by the Neoplatonist philosopher Marinus of Neapolis as literary arenas in which the authors engaged in the negotiation of the meaning and relevance of Plato and the Platonic corpus for intellectual formation and virtuous living. In the context of a rapidly Christianizing educational field, the authors of these texts defined philosophical concepts, interpreted Platonic texts, and outlined the praxis of practical virtue by narrating the lives of exemplary figures. The Religious History and the Proclus are not simply the works of a Christian and a “pagan” but the literary productions of two educated and cultivated intellectuals of the fifth century, formed by paideia, who offered visions of the philosophical life and education through their biographical writings.

2013

Dissertation supervised by Dr. Ronald Polansky This dissertation presents a theory of philosophical autobiography. It includes studies of the autobiographical writings of Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Vico, and Nietzsche. I argue that philosophers write autobiographies in order to present and give an account of philosophical first principles. I also argue that Plato invented philosophical autobiography. v DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Wilhelm S. Wurzer and Eleanor Holveck, two philosophers who taught me to think differently. viii

This is the fourth in series of brief, analytic biographies of the 'Top-Nine' thinkers, whose thoughts have powerfully influenced large numbers of people across extended time scales. They are all reviewed here in the order of their birth. Negative thinkers (e.g. Hitler, Stalin) are ignored, while 'Mythic' talkers (like Jesus) are also ignored as little direct written information is available. Plato has the enviable reputation as the first teacher of Greek Philosophy (the attempt to describe our living world in a structured set of regular words). He has dominated the European approach to the Greek View and defined too much of the Art of Philosophy. He was a hugely derivative thinker: building on Socrates and Pythagoras with a hidden agenda of enforcing the aristocratic viewpoint on every society. His attempt to impose abstraction on his thinking led him to steal Parmenides' empty theory of 'Forms', where even simple problems became twisted into no sense. His longlasting achievement was the establishment of schools ('Academies') to propagandize an unending number of mediocrities to maintain his reputation and authority. The 'Theory of Forms' underlies Plato's most original work (The Republic) where attempts to promote a timeless model of society controlled by 'his' type of intellectual. There is little thought of personal freedom or individual rights as everything is tightly defined and controlled for the State and its Directors. Like too many clever intellectuals, Plato only admired one aspect of living that he was capable of defining. He had no time for the Arts (and certainly not Entertainment) that he saw as distractive. His real success was inspiring his best pupil (Aristotle) to construct the study of thinking and research, so as to establish his own rival school (the Lyceum). Unfortunately, Plato's writing style became venerated as the model for the written word, while being first has kept his reputation as unimpeachable. This essay allowed me to investigate directly one of the most influential thinkers that have played too strong a role in western thinking, especially the rigid significance of mathematics in descriptions of frozen reality: a broad myth that is rarely challenged enough today [see my Numbers essay].

The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 13 (2019) 1-3, 2019

Diogenes Laertius, 2020

Diogenes' encyclopedic account of Greek philosophy is unique in its range and amplitude. He drew upon a large range of earlier biographers and compilers of doctrines (doxographers), as he conscientiously acknowledges, but he also organized that material according to schemes that he seems partly to have chosen for himself As we would expect of any author with antiquarian interests, chronology strongly shapes Diogenes' presentation of his individual philosophers; however, rather than 0 }®,~ treating the whole set in the order of y~t to Gldes.t he presents them according • ". t to their position as reputed or actual founders of schools and by their succession J""""r within schools. Arranging the philosophers in this way harks back to the Hellenistic XVI epoch (late fourth century BC to early first century BC), when Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum had been augmented at Athens by the new schools ofZeno (Stoa) and Epicurus (Garden), both of which flourished well into the Christian era. Five of Diogenes' ten books (Books 3-7 and 10) are composed accordingly, with Plato's Academic successors from Speusippus to Clitomachus also assigned their own section, Book 4. The remaining books are more random in their collection of individuals. The "successions" of these philosophers have more to do with perceived or imagined affinity and indebtedness than with formal allegiance to an actual school. Thus Socrates is obscurely tucked into Book 2, which begins with the early Ionian cosmologist Anaximander and ends with twelve of Socrates' associates and later adherents. These Socratics include not only such major figures as Xenophon, Aristippus, and Euclides but also Simmias and Cebes, whose main claim to fame was their presence as Pythagoreans in Plato's dialogue Phaedo. Socrates owes his unemphatic position in this group to reputedly being a student of the Athenian philosopher Archelaus, himself a student of the Ionian Anaxagoras. Diogenes, however, had previously affirmed Socrates' preeminence by asserting in the prologue to Book 1 that Socrates "introduced moral philosophy" (1.14). Thence, he says, philosophy passed down to "the Socratics" (from Plato to Clitomachus, Books 3-4), to Aristotle and the Peripatetics (Book 5), and thirdly to the Cynics and Stoics (Books 6-7). Thus, the emblematic figure of Socrates could seem to have parented half of Diogenes' Book 2, and the whole of Books 3 through 7-not bad for a philosopher who himself wrote nothing. Of the remaining five books, only number 10, which treats Epicurus alone, is about a philosopher who actually initiated a school with an official line of successors. Book 8, headed by Pythagoras, includes, among others, Empedocles and the eminent astronomer Eudoxus, while Book 9, starting with Heraclitus and ending with Timon, along the way includes the Eleatics (Parmenides and Zeno), the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, and the sophist Protagoras. Most heterogeneous is Book 1: here Diogenes starts with Thales ofMiletus, who had been everyone's favorite first philosopher since the time of Aristotle or earlier. But instead of continuing, like modern textbooks, with Anaximander and Anaximenes (Thales' younger Milesian cosmologists), Diogenes groups Thales with ~so-called sages, pre-philosophers who include the celebrated Athenian poet-statesman Solon.

This paper represents a brief sketch of my intellectual and academic personal history beginning with early college and continuing to the present. Some highlights include an apprenticeship with Allen Ginsberg (click on the links; the details and depth are in the linked documents), working full-time as a writer for an Artificial Intelligence Lab while writing a dissertation on nineteenth-century science and culture, and so much more. A revision might include a treatment of my early high school years as a Catholic seminarian living nearly year-round in a Capuchin monastery. Certainly, the connection between this rigorous scholarly environment and intensive religious indoctrination should be understood as a prelude to my eventual scholarship in Secularism. Please see the final page for a bibliography of my web essays that are listed nowhere else on the web as such. You'll see why if you read them. Comments very welcome. Not sure what I'm doing this for, but it may be germinal for a longer academic and scholarly memoir. Thank you.