same turf that Plato staked out; hence it is not surprising to find the Megarian
school polemicizing against Plato for breaking up pure Being into a plurality
of Ideas, and later against Aristotle for his conception of potentiality as an
additional dimension of Being. Across the next two generations, the Megarian
school maintained a good deal of prominence. It backed away from the Eleatic
metaphysics and placed increasing emphasis on developing formal logic and
on the famous debating skills of members such as Stilpo and Eubulides, who
was known as a paradoxer, and whose followers were known as Eristics for
their contentiousness. This kept the Megarians in the public eye, but also
moved them increasingly onto the same turf as the Skeptics and Cynics; late
in the century they amalgamated with the Cynics and eventually with the
Stoics.
Antisthenes, taking the other direction, played up the dialectical side of
Socrates’ method, with a special emphasis on opposing other schools of
thought. He seems to have been a materialist, declaring against Plato that only
the bodily exists; he held that pain is a good thing, citing hero stories of the
deeds of Heracles (Reale, 1987: 367–370)—thus taking the opposite side from
the hedonistic school of Aristippus. He also scorned intellectual debate by
arguing that it is impossible for two men to contradict each other. Whether or
not Diogenes was Antisthenes’ pupil—Antisthenes rejected the practice, now
followed by his rivals, of taking formal pupils—Diogenes went on to fill this
slot in the intellectual world by making himself an exemplar of anti-conven-
tionality in every respect. Diogenes took up the sophisticated position of being
an intellectual’s anti-intellectual, a mocker of all. His followers, to the extent
that they were able to sustain themselves, did so by institutionalizing mockery
as a literary form.
The Skeptics we have already noted. In some respects Pyrrho and Timon
duplicated the turf that the Megarian logicians were already occupying, while
jettisoning any positive doctrine such as Eleatic metaphysics; they made skep-
ticism not just an epistemological argument but a lifestyle, which in turn
brought them onto Cynic territory. It is not surprising that all three of these
network lineages were unstable, though the core intellectual doctrine of skep-
ticism was to have a long history in a series of new homes.
In the long run of the intellectual community, these schools became “mi-
nor”; in their day, however, they attracted the most attention of all. Their
chosen turf overlapped most closely with lay concerns, and personalities such
as Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, and Pyrrho dramatized themselves in the
public eye.^16 This was also true of the famous Aristippus and his Cyrenaic
school. Aristippus took the subjectivist line that only feelings exist for us; and
he pushed this to an ethical conclusion, that the individual could control his
own happiness. Aristippus was admired, like Socrates, for his gay serenity. The
98 •^ The Skeleton of Theory