Aenesidemus
historical figure · 3 works · 6 mentions · 10 anchored passages
Aenesidemus of Cnossus
in the texts
De Anima
Philosopher who held air to be the soul's substance.
— not that air is its very substance (although this seemed so to Aenesidemus and Anaximenes, and, I think, according to some, to Heraclitus too), nor that it is light (although this pleased Heraclides of Pontus).
for they too maintain the unity of the soul, which, diffused through the whole body and everywhere itself, like breath in a pipe through its holes, so flashes forth through the organs of sense in various ways — not so much cut up as dispensed.
This the Stoics hold with Aenesidemus, and Plato himself at times, when he says that the soul, otherwise strange and an exile from the womb, is led in by the first inbreathing of the infant as it is born, just as it is led out by the last out-breathing.
Vitae philosophorum
Sceptic philosopher and author of several works who is the passage's principal authority for describing the Pyrrhonean method and its criterion of the apparent.
But Aenesidemus says that it was only his philosophy that was based upon suspension of judgement, and that he did not lack foresight in his everyday acts.
Thus the Pyrrhonean principle, as Aenesidemus says in the introduction to his Pyrrhonics, is but a report on phenomena or on any kind of judgement, a report in which all things are brought to bear on one another, and in the comparison are found to present much anomaly and confusion.
Pyrrho himself, indeed, left no writings, but his associates Timon, Aenesidemus, Numenius and Nausiphanes did;