TWO VOLUMES SIT ON MY DESK: ONE, thick and weighty, features a marble bust of Plato on the cover. The other, slimmer, volume bears the image of Diogenes in his amphora surrounded by dogs. The contrast between the two contemporaries and rivals shines through and it is striking that more than 2,000 years after the height of Athenian philosophy, we are still revisiting them. In their lives we find two fiercely opposed poles of a culture that has profoundly shaped our world.
It’s a philosophical grudge match between the towering Goliath of the Western canon — the broad-shouldered champion of metaphysics and founder of the academy to whom all philosophy is a footnote — and the
