“Philosophy is like a living creature: logic is its bones and sinews, ethics its flesh, and physics its soul.”
— Zeno of CitiumStoic analogy reported in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.40; approximate English rendering, attribution to Zeno personally is uncertain
Commentary
This analogy, which Diogenes Laertius reports in his account of Stoic philosophy, compares the three parts of philosophy to the parts of a living being, and it is one of the most often cited images of Stoic systematics. Logic provides the structure, ethics the substance of the good life, and physics the animating principle that connects them to the cosmos. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, in The Hellenistic Philosophers, note that the analogy expresses the Stoic conviction that the parts of philosophy form an organic unity, so that no branch can be studied in isolation. Malcolm Schofield observes that the image of an organism reflects the Stoic conception of the cosmos as a living, rational whole, a view that gives the analogy more than rhetorical force. Brad Inwood has shown that the Stoics used similar analogies to defend the integration of logic and physics, against critics who treated them as separate disciplines. Julia Annas notes that the analogy's attribution to Zeno personally is uncertain, since it appears in the later doxographic tradition. The English is an approximation, and the Greek should be consulted before quotation.
Commentary
This analogy, which Diogenes Laertius reports in his account of Stoic philosophy, compares the three parts of philosophy to the parts of a living being, and it is one of the most often cited images of Stoic systematics. Logic provides the structure, ethics the substance of the good life, and physics the animating principle that connects them to the cosmos. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, in The Hellenistic Philosophers, note that the analogy expresses the Stoic conviction that the parts of philosophy form an organic unity, so that no branch can be studied in isolation. Malcolm Schofield observes that the image of an organism reflects the Stoic conception of the cosmos as a living, rational whole, a view that gives the analogy more than rhetorical force. Brad Inwood has shown that the Stoics used similar analogies to defend the integration of logic and physics, against critics who treated them as separate disciplines. Julia Annas notes that the analogy's attribution to Zeno personally is uncertain, since it appears in the later doxographic tradition. The English is an approximation, and the Greek should be consulted before quotation.