Chapter II. On the Mutual Contradiction and Conflict of the Philosophers

Now, I think, we ought before all things to begin from the first foundation of philosophy among the Greeks, and to learn concerning the so-called physical philosophers before the time of Plato, who they were, and what sort of men their philosophy found as champions of its system; then we must pass on to the successors of Plato, and learn who they also were, and survey their mutual disputations, and review also the dissensions of the other sects, and the oppositions of their opinions, wherein I shall exhibit the noble combatants like boxers eagerly exchanging blows as on a stage before the spectators.

Let us, for instance, at once observe how, on the one hand, Plato used to scoff at the earliest philosophers who preceded him, and how others scoffed at Plato’s friends and successors: and again in turn how Plato’s disciples used to criticize the wise doctrines of Aristotle’s fertile thought: and how those who boasted of Aristotle and the Peripatetic School used to prove that the views of those who preferred the opposite sect were nonsense.

You will also see the clever and precise doctrines of the subtlety of the Stoics ridiculed in turn by others, and all the philosophers on all sides struggling against their: neighbours, and most bravely joining in battle and wrestling, so that even with hands and tongue, or rather with pen and ink, they raise strongholds of war against each other, striking, as it were, and being struck by the spears and various weapons of their wordy war.

And in this strife of athletes our arena will include, in addition to those already mentioned, men stripped of all truth, who have taken up arms in opposition to all the dogmatic philosophers alike; I mean the Pyrrhonists, who declared that in man’s world there is nothing comprehensible; and those who said with Aristippus that the feelings were the sole objects of perception, and then again those who with Metrodorus and Protagoras said that we ought to believe only the sensations of the body.

Over against these we shall at the same time strip for the combat the schools of Xenophanes and Parmenides, who arrayed themselves on the opposite side and annihilated the senses.

Neither shall we omit the champions of pleasure, but shall enroll their leader Epicurus also with those already mentioned. But against all alike we shall use their own weapons to set forth their confutation.

Also of all the so-called physicists alike I shall drag out to light both the discrepancies of their doctrines and the futility of their eager studies; not at all as a hater of the Greeks or of reason, far from it, but to remove all cause of slanderous accusation, that we have preferred the Hebrew oracles from having forsooth been very little acquainted with Hellenic culture.