The origins of Stoic cosmology.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Slightly rubbed jacket, pencil annotations on front flap and mock title, otherwise very good and clean. / Leicht beriebener Umschlag, Bleistiftanmerkung auf vorderem Klappentext und Schmutztitel, sonst sehr gut und sauber. - Contents: Preface -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- I : Corporealism -- II : Principles -- III : Cosmogony -- IV : Cosmology -- V : Cosmobiology -- VI : The Cosmic Cycle -- VII : Epilogue: The Definition of Nature and the Origins of Stoic Cosmology -- Appendixes: I. Influences on Stoicism According to the Biographical Tradition -- II. The Contents of Book One of Chrysippus�s Physics -- III. Cleanthes� Cosmogony -- IV. Accounts of the Stoic Proofs for the Immobility and Coherence of the Cosmos -- V. Chrysippus�s Statement on the Alleged Imperishability of the Cosmos -- VI. Cleanthes� Proof for the Intelligence of the Cosmos -- Indexes. - Though there never was in antiquity a single, all-pervasive ideology or school of philosophy, for half a millennium beginning about 300 B.C., the Stoic outlook, as it apprehended both the physical and ethical universes, captured a sufficiently large number of adherents to be considered the ancient counterpart of the currently popular scientific world view. This world view of the Stoics appealed to all classes and attracted slaves and laborers as well as kings and emperors. Its ideas and tenets infiltrated and shaped all branches of art and learning �poetry, drama, religion, theology, science, medicine, law, and government � and its concepts influenced and informed the later doctrines of Christianity, Gnosticism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, and Neoplatonism. Despite its undoubted historical importance, however, the question of Stoicism�s origin has usually been passed over with glib generalizations; and there has remained, until the appearance of Professor Hahm�s book, a crucial need to undertake a systematic study of all the evidence in order to determine conclusively from whom the ideas of the Stoics were derived, what sorts of ideas they appropriated, and how they used this borrowed material to create a new and enduring popular philosophy. Professor Hahm performs this service for one of the major areas of Stoic philosophy. On the basis of a new and more careful reconstruction of the cosmological theories of Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, the three heads of the Stoic school in the third century B.C., Hahm demonstrates that Stoic cosmology grew directly out of the contemporary philosophical and scientific debates and was, in fact, a unique, original synthesis of the latest Greek theories of cosmology and biology. This new understanding of Stoic cosmology in its historical perspective sheds new light on the role of Stoicism in Greek intellectual history. It indicates that the Stoics, like their contemporaries the Epicureans, were striving to achieve a unified science based on a single set of elementary principles. Biology and cosmology, for example, were not seen as governed by separate sets of axioms and were not explained on the basis of discrete bodies of theory, but were understood in terms of the same coherent principles as integral components of a unified world view. In contrast with Aristotle, who laid the foundations for the present-day atomization of knowledge into ever more diverse and specialized fields and disciplines, the Stoics synthesized not only disparate theories from different sciences, but disparate theories within a single science, to produce, in a century of almost unparalleled vitality and growth, a totally new philosophy that was to have a signal and enduring effect on all that followed and that cannot be explained by the simplistic formulas heretofore employed. - David E. Hahm is an associate professor of classics at the Ohio State University. ISBN 9780814202531