Greek Philosophy Research Paper

The first Greek Stoic was Zeno of Citium. He arrived in Athens when he was twenty-two years old and studied with a group known as the Cynics but that does not mean the same as it does today. In Greek it meant doglike or without shame. These people tried to live natural lives, using minimal hygiene and clothes and permitting incest and cannibalism. He started teaching when he was thirty-three in the Athenian stoa. A stoa is a long colonnade where there was usually a marketplace. The Stoics preferred a public place to learn and teach. The norm of the time was to divide philosophy into three subjects, logic which is made up of formal logic, semantics, grammar, stylistics, and epistemology. The second part of three is ethics which was the most
They use the term cosmos in three ways. First to refer to God himself being indestructible and ingenerated, being the craftsman of everything. They also call the organization of the stars the cosmos and third things that are composed of both. They say that the cosmos is administered by a mind and that mind is God. Since this mind is everywhere, God is everywhere. They continue by saying that if God is in all things and the mind that is God is in all things therefor the cosmos is an animal and alive and rational. Heaven is the leading part of the cosmos is what some Stoics would say and others would say the sun is the leading part. They agree that that the cosmos is one, and it is surrounded by an incorporeal void. Inside the cosmos there is no void because the cosmos is united or unified. Time is an incorporeal thing being an interval of the movement of the cosmos. The past and future are unlimited but the present is unlimited. They think the cosmos is destructible. They think this because it is generated it can be destroyed. If something is able to change for the worse than it can be destroyed and because there are floods and droughts, changes for the worse, it can be destroyed. If a part of a whole can be destroyed then the whole can be destroyed
And if it is that cannot be known to be true. The Stoics believe that the universe can cosmos can be destroyed, if it was created then it can be destroyed. I agree with this, they also say that if a part of something can be destroyed than so can the whole and since they believe that the cosmos is a whole they believe it can be destroyed. I am not sure if I agree with this because they don’t seem to make a clear enough distinction between the cosmos and God. If they are saying that God can be destroyed I do not agree.
Addressing how the Stoics think that the cosmos was made though fire and rarefication, this is false there is no scientific explanation for this. Thinking that the cosmos is an animal irrational, there is nothing to prove this. There is life inside the cosmos but it is not living therefore it is not an animal. If it not an animal and not God it would not have rational intelligence. This is where their lack of distinction between cosmos and God causes problems. Saying the cosmos rational when God