Cultural Reception, Translation and Transformation from Medieval to Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Martin McLaughlin. Guido Bonsaver, Brian Richardson, and Giuseppe Stellardi, eds. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017. xxxii + 444 pp. $99.
superior philosophical methods, the second a defense for the philosopher’s textual corpus as a whole. The study of philosophical biography continues in the sixth and seventh essays of the volume that investigate how biographers of philosophers in the seventeenth century embraced or rejected Laertius’s style in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. The first essay, by Michael Weichenhan, details how Pierre Gassendi’s biography of Epicurus, written to renew interest in the philosopher, also embraced Laertius’s premodern style of philosophical biography. Leo Catana’s essay, in contrast, posits that Christoph August Heumann’s critique of Porphyrys’s Life of Plotinus discredited the entire tradition of biographical history of philosophy and, subsequently, the creator of this method, Diogenes Laertius. In so doing, Heumann would change the face of philosophical history for two millennia, a history that would be entirely disinterested in philosophers’ life stories.