Les vies des plus illustres philosophes de l'antiquité, avec leurs dogmes, leurs systêmes, leur morale, & leurs sentences les plus remarquables. Traduites du grec de Diogène Laerce (by J.-G. Chauffepié). Auxquelles on a ajouté la Vie de l'auteur, celles d'Epictète, de Confucius, & leur morale; & un abrégé historique de la vie des femmes philosophes de l'antiquité. Nouvelle édition. by DIOGENES LAERTIUS

Paris, Chez Richard, Libraire, rue de la Harpe, 1796. 8vo. 2 volumes: XXXII,507,(1 blank); 535,(1) p. Calf 20 cm The greatest known source of information about the philosophers of antiquity (Ref: Hoffmann 1,570; Brunet 2,721; cf. Cioranescu 18849; Graesse 2,397; Ebert 6185) (Details: Backs ruled gilt, and with a shield. Marbled endpapers. Edges dyed red) (Condition: Backs very rubbed. Back of volume 1 cracked. Joints cracking, but still strong. Head of the spines worn away. Partly foxed. Some inkstains. Two labels on the front pastedown) (Note: The 'Lives and Doctrines of the Philosophers' of the Greek author Diogenes Laertius, who lived probably in the first half of the third century A.D., is still 'our best indirect source of knowledge for classical philosophy'. The 'Lives' comprises both a biographical and a doxographical account, basically focused on Greek thinkers from the 6th to the 3rd century B.C. (from Thales to Epicurus), although references to schools and individuals extend to at least the 2nd century A.D.' (The Classical Tradition, Cambr. Mass. 2010, p. 271) Diogenes Laertius drew his material from earlier compilations, and his doxographic account offers long excerpts from primary texts not transmitted elsewhere, for example Epicurus' 'Principal Doctrines'. Diogenes' reliability and value differ from passage to passage. Some give invaluable information, other passages offer mere caricature. His approach is not a 'systematic analysis, but rather a eulogistic narrative of the course of ancient philosophy, and of the four main classical schools, the Academy, Peripatetics, Stoics and Epicureans. Anecdotal and perhaps largely apocryphal in nature, still it gave to Renaissance humanists, like Leonardo Bruni, Machiavelli, Erasmus et alii, some conception of ancient philosophy, especially of Platonic and Epicurean thought.' (Ch.L. Stinger, 'Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian antiquity in the Italian Renaissance', Albany 1977, p. 71) To the second volume has been added a 75 page biography of Confucius and, of special interest, 90 pages with short biographies of ancient women philosophers. This section, a translation of 'Historia Mulierum Philosopharum' was taken and translated from the authoritative Diogenes Laertius edition of the French scholar Aegidius Menagius, or Giles Ménage, of 1692. We quote concerning this section the abstract of an article of professor Richard Maber: 'The late work of Gilles Ménage (1613-1692), 'Historia mulierum philosopharum' (1690), is a compilation of all the information that he could gather concerning women philosophers from earliest antiquity to the fourteenth century. It made little impact when first published, but is currently the subject of renewed interest in the context of women's studies, with recent translations into English, French, Italian, and Spanish. However the work's true importance is much greater than has been realised. Ménage included it, as he had always intended, in his monumental and definitive edition of Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers (1692), the greatest known source of information about the (male) philosophers of antiquity. Ménage's 'Historia' thus became a supplement, and corrective, to Diogenes Laertius, and was included with subsequent editions and translations of the irreplaceable Greek text. In this way, the reality of women's capacity for the highest intellectual achievement was incontrovertibly established, and women were integrated into the mainstream of the history of philosophy. An analysis of the frontispieces to the three volumes of Chauffepié's translation of Diogenes (1758) demonstrates how, thanks explicitly to Ménage's work, the role of women was now seen as crucial to modern intellectual life'. (Richard G. Maber (2010), 'Re-Gendering Intellectual Life: Gilles Ménage and his Histoire des femmes philosophes', Seventeenth-Century French Studies 32(1): 45-60) This French translation of Diogenes Laertius and of the 'Historia Mulierum Philosopharum' of Ménage is attributed to Jacques-Georges Chauffepié, a calvinist minister of the Walloon Church, of French origin, born in Leeuwarden in 1702. He preached in Flushing, Delft and Amsterdam, where he died in 1766. It was first published in Amsterdam in 1758. (NNBW 4,417/18, and Wikipédia 'Jacques-Georges Chauffepié', with a wrong date of his death) (Provenance: Two old labels of booksellers on the front pastedown: one of 'Libreria Puvill, libros antiguos. Boters, 10-Barcelona-2, España' & one older one: 'Vendese en la Libreria de Josef Cerqueda, calle de la Boearia, en Barcelona'. 'Puvill libros, librería técnica SA' still exists. Josef Cerqueda was active at the beginning of the 19th century) (Collation: a-b8; A-2H8, 2I6; A-2K8, 2L4) (Photographs on request)