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Diogenes Laërtius: 5 ideas and puzzles worth knowing

5 ideas and puzzles from Diogenes Laërtius, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• One grain of sand is never a heap — so when does a heap begin?

  Take a heap of sand and remove one grain: still a heap. Repeat that step a million times, one grain at a time, and logic says you should still call it a heap — even down to a singl…

  — Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

• The most powerful man in the world offered him anything he wanted. He asked him to move

  Diogenes the Cynic lived in a large ceramic jar in Athens, rejecting property, status and convention. When Alexander the Great visited and asked what he could do for him, Diogenes …

  — Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

• He argued the wisest response to any claim is to suspend judgment entirely

  Pyrrho of Elis, traveling with Alexander the Great's army into India in the 4th century BC, concluded that we can never know how things really are — only how they appear to us. His…

  — Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book IX

• Remove one grain at a time from a heap — when exactly does it stop being a heap?

  A heap of a million grains of sand is still a heap after you take away one grain. Do that again and again, one grain at a time, and by the same reasoning it should always still be …

  — Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

• A shipwrecked merchant lost everything, then founded one of history's great philosophies

  Around 300 BCE, the Phoenician merchant Zeno of Citium lost his cargo in a shipwreck near Athens. While stranded, he wandered into a bookshop, discovered philosophy, and began stud…

  — Diogenes Laertius (account of Zeno of Citium), Lives of Eminent Philosophers

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