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Cynical Cosmopolitanism
- Theory & Event
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 21, Number 3, July 2018
- pp. 607-626
- 10.1353/tae.2018.0037
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
The Ancient Cynic Diogenes of Sinope was the first to call himself a cosmopolitan because the Cynic true life, as a living according to phusis rather than nomos (law), enabled the negation of the polis. The polis, which divides according to citizenship, was shown to be nothing and Diogenes became a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês) by default. I link this to the Cynic sense of phusis as ‘being’, rather than the usual ‘nature’, concluding that this cosmopolitanism by way of phusis was universal in a way that later cosmopolitanisms by way of kosmos (as in Stoicism) could never be.