Talk:Zeno of Citium/Archive 1

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Archive 1

(Question)

What the heck does the below sentence actually mean? "Having been companionable, the king, Antigonos of Macedonia, often abided by him." Is "companionable" even a word?

companionable |kəmˌpønjənəbəl|
adjective
(of a person) friendly and sociable : a companionable young man.
 • (of a shared situation) relaxed and pleasant : they walked in companionable silence.
New Oxford American Dictionary

Overall, I do have to agree. Some sentences read like a 60-year-old philosophy textbook. There are no refereneces at this time. How can that be? Is this page a "lift" from something copyrighted? I'll put this on my to-do list. Wikipedia can at least get the underpinnings of the Western World cited correctly!

--Charles Gaudette 21:00, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

update

Folks, Zeno seems to be very influential, and this page is IMHO a disservice. I want to update this with a lot of meat (so to speak), and also want your opinion, additions, whatnot. Thanks and best, Mu5ti 14:25, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Anarchist

I have removed the nonsense piece about Zeno being the first anarchist. WolfgangRieger 18:00, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Dennis Dalton, in the teaching company lecture "Power over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory," cites Zeno as an early anarchist.

Furthermore, according to Kropotkin, Zeno was "the best exponent of Anarchist philosophy in ancient Greece". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.180.101.118 (talk • contribs)

If you've got the references, then make the edit. Zeno Izen 16:24, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 04:33, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Zeno

Zeno was born in Citium on the Island of Cyprus. Originally he was a merchant, but he shipwreaked in Athens and stayed there to study philosohpies. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.66.243.206 (talk) 17:39, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Physics - Logic - Ethics

The article states: "Following the ideas of the Academics, Zeno divided philosophy into three parts". Other than Aristotle's Topics (I.14), is there any basis for crediting this division to the Academics generally? And if the sole source was the Topics, should this not be explicitly stated? hgilbert (talk) 13:43, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

There is some evidence that the three-fold division may have originated among the Academics, but it's based on second-hand testimony by later classical authors. Several ancient sources claim that Plato invented (or anticipated) the three-fold division (eg. Cicero, Acad. i. 5, 19; Apuleius, De Platone, i. 3), although the claim is considered rather dubious. Cicero, in another passage (De Finibus, iv. 2, 3-4) says that Speusippus, Aristotle, Xenocrates, Polemon, and Theophrastus all anticipated the Stoics' three-fold division. Sextus Empiricus (Adv. Math. vii. 16) says that Plato pioneered the division but it was "Xenocrates and the Peripatetics who explicitly adopted the division". Concerning this passage, The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy (page xiv) says:

most scholars are content to ascribe the formal origin of the division to Xenocrates. The Peripatetics acknowledge a three-fold division, but not a literal tripartition; for they preferred to split philosophy itself into two parts, theoretical and practical (which corresponded roughly to physics and ethics), and to deem logic to be not a part but a tool or instrument of philosophy

Pasicles (talk) 19:28, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. hgilbert (talk) 20:52, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Zeno's pantheism

I undid the edits by User:68.40.73.26 on 27 April 2012, because he/she claimed the source used (Diogenes Laertius) doesn't say that the universe is god but rather "nature is god's will manifested, a divine decree". But in fact Diogenes Laërtius, vii. 148 says:

The substance of God, Zeno says, is the entire cosmos and the heaven.

There is a question over whether this slightly ambiguous statement equates to full-on pantheism, but a debate on this needs to reference scholarly sources on the matter. Pasicles (talk) 20:46, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Death

Currently it stands on the article that Zeno died of "self-suffocation," implying that he held his breath until he died. Ignoring the fact that this is simply impossible (you pass out and start breathing before death can occur), according to The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers: Book VII: The Stoics" by the cited author Diogenes Laërtius as published on the Fordham University's portal called "Ancient History Sourcebook", Zeno "immediately...strangled himself." Source.

See the source for more information. I believe it is more accurate to say that Zeno strangled himself to death, not suffocated himself to death.

Hi JesseKramme. I should have made my explanation clearer, and that's my mistake. The translation of Diogenes Laërtius used on the Fordham website is that made by Charles Duke Yonge in 1853. In checking the information I used the translation by Robert Drew Hicks, 1925, for the Loeb Classical Library ([1]). The specific Greek text here at book vii. 28 is: "παραχρῆμα ἐτελεύτησεν, ἀποπνίξας ἑαυτόν" which translates (roughly) as "forthwith died, choked/suffocated himself". The problem here is how one translates ἀποπνίξας (apopnicas) which derives from ἀποπνίγω (apopnigo). He somehow choked himself or suffocated himself. It is of course impossible to die from holding your breath, but the story of self-suffocation was also told in antiquity about Diogenes of Sinope. There is actually a symbolism in the story in that as a philosopher he calmly and serenely just simply chose the right moment to die, and simply stopped his own life, (no matter that it's impossible to die from holding your breath or indeed from just strangling yourself). In modifying your edit - and I should have made this clearer - I was trying to reach a compromise between the two readings:

Yonge says he "immediately he strangled himself", Hicks says he "died on the spot through holding his breath" - I think simply saying that Zeno "died by self-suffocation" is probably a reasonable compromise between the two readings. Pasicles (talk) 22:01, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the great explanation. I am completely satisfied with the way it stands now. Thanks for taking the time to expand on this! JesseKramme (talk) 05:41, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

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Cynicism

I think that writing Stoicism was based on Cynicism is a bit misleading as a statement on it's own, without even hinting that there were nuances to how those philosophies developed, and what their relationship to each other is. I think this can end up in confusion for people with only surface-level knowledge which I suspect most looking at this page will have.

I tried to think of how to explain this succinctly and the best explanation I can come up with is that:

Stoics are students of Zeno and eventually his students. This is supported at least by Diogenes Laertius in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

Cynics were labeled as Cynics, usually by others. As far as I know, it's not entirely clear who was first called a cynic. It also is not clear whether it was used as a derogatory term or not: The ancient greek word for Cynic meant 'dog-like.'

Both groups share similar maxims about things like "Living in accordance with nature," but it seems they understood their shared ideas very differently

I don't have good, sourced sentences to fix this though, and I'm curious what others think.

Xenogis (talk) 12:52, 18 February 2019 (UTC)