display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 1782 | Stoics teach that God is a unity, variously known as Mind, or Fate, or Jupiter [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics teach that God is unity, and that he is called Mind, and Fate, and Jupiter, and by many names besides. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.Ze.68 |
| 20830 | Death can't separate soul from body, because incorporeal soul can't unite with body [Chrysippus] |
| Full Idea: Death is a separation of soul from body. But nothing incorporeal can be separated from a body. For neither does anything incorporeal touch a body, and the soul touches and is separated from the body. Therefore the soul is not incorporeal. | |
| From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by Tertullian - The Soul as an 'Astral Body' 5.3 | |
| A reaction: This is the classic interaction difficulty for substance dualist theories of mind. |
| 19339 | Evil is a negation of good, which arises from non-being [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The cause of good is positive, but evil is a defect, that is, a privation or negation, and consequently, it arises from nothingness or nonbeing. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Dialogue on human freedom and origin of evil [1695], p.114) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to illustrate his idea from mathematics. He is modifying Augustine's view that evil is an absence of good, by adding nonbeing as the driving force behind it. Doesn't sound very persuasive to me. |
| 13164 | God only made sin possible because a much greater good can be derived from it [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We must believe that God would not have allowed sin nor would he have created things he knows will sin, if he could not derive from them a good incomparably greater than the resulting evil. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Dialogue on human freedom and origin of evil [1695], p.115) | |
| A reaction: Why 'must' we believe this? Do we have to imagine all the genocides shrinking to insignificance once we grasp the wonderful goods that can be derived from them? The end justifies the means. Genocide is actually a good thing. Hm. |
| 21404 | There is a rationale in terrible disasters; they are useful to the whole, and make good possible [Chrysippus] |
| Full Idea: The evil which occurs in terrible disasters has a rationale [logos] peculiar to itself: for in a sense it occurs in accordance with universal reason, and is not without usefulness in relation to the whole. For without it there could be no good. | |
| From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 4.4.5 | |
| A reaction: [a quotation from Chrysippus. Plutarch, Comm Not 1065b] A nice question about any terrible disaster is whether it is in some way 'useful', if we take a broader view of things. Almost everything has a good aspect, from that perspective. |