Lucian

From THE PLATONIC RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND, 1932 by Ernst Cassirer

" Humour formed the point of contact between Erasmus and Thomas More and led to their collaboration. That writing of Erasmus's from which, more perhaps than from any other, one can gain an insight into his personality, his genius as a writer, his new humanistic ideal, and his attitude towards life and the world, was the product of their joint reading of Lucian. "

Translated by James P. Pettegrove.
Nelson 1953, p. 172.
(Austin : University of Texas Press 1953.)

From THE ROLE OF INFINITY IN THE COSMOLOGY OF EPICURUS, 1936 by Cassius Jackson Keyser

In dealing with points, lines, planes, and figures composed of them, Euclid proceeds just as if there are such things. But are there in fact? Some eminent thinkers have answered no�Lucian, for example, and Polyaenus. If these deniers be right, Euclid�s Elements is simply a treatise on a certain kind of fictions, a certain kind of as ifs, a certain kind of als ob�s (to use the fine phrase of Vaihinger in his Philosophie des Als Ob). Why should it not be so? If a non-fiction has a kind of reality that a fiction has not, then, of course, a fiction has a kind of fictionality that a non-fiction has not. Which is better? . . . Personally I am prepared not to mourn if it be sometime discovered that mathematics is just a logic, or a part of the logic, of fictions. Is there a logic of non-fictions? Who knows?

The Rational and the Superrational
New York, Scripta Mathematica 1952, pp. 182-3.