At the same time, both N.’s project and his text imply that we have a decent consensus about Antisthenes at the level of primary research. This may be true, and it is surely exciting to see topics from the classical world packaged for a general audience. xii) as we acknowledge and confront today’s versions of “irrationality or the negation of reason,” which has “ensured the perennial abandonment of genuine human nature” (p. According to N., who has written previously (and, it seems, rapidly) on Socrates, the ancient Cynics and Diogenes of Sinope, 4 Antisthenes, too, can serve as “a source of guidance” (p. 2) and has instead taken on a different challenge, to engage an audience of the reading public, rather than scholars of the ancient world, with the reformative projects of Antisthenes. N., however, a professor of philosophy at New York Institute of Technology, has made light of this scholarly challenge (reporting that “Much has been written on Antisthenes,” p. It now becomes the work on Antisthenes most widely available in American university libraries, and the first (or often only) to turn up in computerized searches. or Britain, Antisthenes of Athens by its historical position takes on a great challenge, to reintroduce and reinterpret its hero for the twenty-first century. Hakkert might be indicated by the type-written copy if not by the misspelling in the title) and the first published in either the U.S. Rankin’s 1986 Anthisthenes (sic) Sokratikos, whose importance to its publisher A.M. Only the sixth monograph published on Antisthenes in any language since 1900 (and this includes an edition of the fragments, as well as a peculiar 1935 dissertation which analyzes a text of Themistius as a rewriting of a lost text by Antisthenes 3), only the second ever in English (following H.D. Thus Luis Navia’s new book on Antisthenes is poised to open an important discussion on a topic not only unjustly neglected, but also, given the recent explosion of interest in the ancient Cynics, 2 timely. This is not to say there is or need be consensus about such figures, only that debate is alive. Basically, modern generalists do not know what to say about Antisthenes because the field lacks the sort of specialized yet accessible scholarly discourse that exists for other fragmentary figures such as Antiphon, Democritus, or Prodicus, for whom the primary evidence is often no more plentiful and no less contradictory. When Antisthenes’ name does appear, what is said is usually of little interest, either too evasive on a given thorny issue, or too dependent on outdated scholarly traditions ultimately rooted in Diogenes Laertius or prejudices about “cynic” attitudes (serious Cynic ideas having been out of the question until recently). 1 Although his name should at least appear in the indices of modern secondary works on topics ranging from ancient democracy and citizenship to women and gender, from logic and the reception of Parmenides to literary criticism and Homer, from the culture/nature debate to theology, it rarely does. Yet the vagaries of history, modern as well as ancient, have virtually erased Antisthenes from our awareness. Antisthenes of Athens was the most important Socratic disciple in Athens in the early decades of the fourth century BCE, if we trust Xenophon and apparent references in Isocrates and his thought, if we knew much about it, would probably supply some missing links between Socrates and the fifth-century intellectual enlightenment, on the one hand, and the fourth-century Cynic movement and third-century blossom of Stoic philosophy, on the other.
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