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Diogenes Laertios

Diogenes Laertios was a Greek philosopher and historian who was born in 240 BC and died in 180 BC. He was probably not a trained philosopher, but rather a collector of anecdotes and quotations. He was probably a skeptic or an epicurean.

The most important work of Diogenes is the work "On the Life and Teachings of the Famous Philosophers".

The treatise is divided into ten books and these are devoted to individual Greek philosophers. Here he divides the philosophers into two schools (Ionian and Italian), but the rules for why he places a given philosopher in a given school are unclear. Most likely he often had no confirmed sources here. Even so, this writing is considered a source of much information and the largest surviving collection of biographical data and quotations.

Of interest is the last book, the tenth, which contains three letters written by the author himself, namely his Testament.

More recently, scholars have returned to Diogenes, since he was the most likely originator of the knowledge of ancient logic. Therefore, propositional logic did not begin with the Stoics, but probably already with Diogenes.