PHYSICIST

Life
Stoic philosopher from Tarsus (Cilicia), who first appears in public life as a long distance runner. When he came to Athens, he joined the Stoic philosophers Zeno and Cleanthes, eventually succeeding the latter as the head of the Stoa. He so outstripped the leading Stoics of his age that he fully justified the appreciation that "without Chrysippus, there would have been no Stoa". He was universally acknowledged to be an extraordinary orator, with an exceptional ability to produce dialectical arguments to use against his opponents. He was also an extremely prolific writer, with more than 700 works to his credit, of which unfortunately only fragments survive. His style, however, did not have the elegance characteristic of other philosophers, because he wrote very rapidly and did not take time to revise his work. As a man he was noted for the austerity of his principles and for his exemplary virtue. For these qualities and for his great wisdom the Athenians accorded him exceptional honours: during his lifetime he was granted the privileges of Athenian citizenship, and after his death - which tradition says was brought about by a fit of laughter - they raised a monument to him in the ancient city cemetery at Ceramicos. As a philosopher he held firmly to the principle of the Stoics: "live in harmony with nature". He argued that the four virtues - prudence, courage, temperance and justice - were products of wisdom.


Work
Chrysippus was one of the wisest of the ancient Greeks, He had an orderly mind, which permitted him to elaborate, systematise and develop the philosophy of the Stoics. His teaching began with logic, continued with physics, and culminated with ethics (Zeno said that philosophy was like an orchard, in which logic is the walls, physics the trees and ethics the fruit). In his studies of logic, Chrysippus concentrated on concepts and propositions, and reduced Aristotle's ten categories to just four: substance, quantity, quality, relation. In physics he insisted on the unity of the first principle (unitary conception). He believed that the world and the whole of creation was made by God, who is wholly good, benevolent and perfect, being formed of perfect matter. God exists everywhere, and is to the universe what the soul is to the human body. In the beginning God took part of himself and in successive transformations of that substance created the world. This divine substance, which is spirit, became successively air, water, earth, fire, until the cosmos was complete. All parts of this world are ruled by the soul of God, which is God himself.