Diogenes Laërtius · fl. 3rd century CE
Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.143 — Diogenes Laërtius on the Stoics
Translation by R. D. Hicks (1925)
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.143
Reported speech · Diogenes Laërtius on the Stoics
It is a living thing in the sense of an animate substance endowed with sensation; for animal is better than non-animal, and nothing is better than the world, ergo the world is a living being. And it is endowed with soul, as is clear from our several souls being each a fragment of it. Boëthus, however, denies that the world is a living thing. The unity of the world is maintained by Zeno in his treatise On the Whole, by Chrysippus, by Apollodorus in his Physics, and by Posidonius in the first book of his Physical Discourse. By the totality of things, the All, is meant, according to Apollodorus, (1) the world, and in another sense (2) the system composed of the world and the void outside it. The world then is finite, the void infinite.
Cite this passage
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.143 (on the Stoics), tr. R. D. Hicks (1925)
https://whatwouldstoicsdo.com/passage/lives-of-the-stoics/7.143
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VII, tr. R. D. Hicks (Loeb, 1925). Text: Perseus Digital Library (CC BY-SA 4.0). Sources and licences
In plain English
AI-written notesArgument that the world is alive: a living thing is better than a lifeless one, nothing is better than the world, so the world lives. Our souls are fragments of it. One thinker denied this. The All means either the world or the world plus infinite void.
Older wording
- “animate”
- — alive, possessing a soul
- “totality of things”
- — everything that exists
- “ergo”
- — therefore
Themes and situations
- Nature and the cosmos
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