2/22/2013 Stoic Space

by Benny Mattis

The Stoics of ancient Greece were known for their corporealist metaphysics--the Stoics held that only bodies existed, bodies being characterized by extension and resistance (or 'capacity to act or be acted upon').  However, while bodies were the only thing that existed for the Stoics, there were also incorporeals, namely, place, time, void and lekta (or "sayables;" Vanessa de Harven likens these to "the meanings of our words"), which merely subsisted, yet, as proper objects of discourse, were not quite nothing and respectively considered "Something" in the Stoic metaphysical framework.

"Place" and "Void" are distinct incorporeal entities, but a common conception interprets the evidence we have from the Stoics as indicating that "Place" is space occupied by a body, whereas "Void" is space that is empty.  For the Stoics, for whom the world is a void-less continuum, Void is that which is outside the world (in modern terms, what lies beyond the edge of the universe of causally potent bodies).

But what lies outside the universe?  More specifically, how might various Stoics have answered this question?  Some interpret the Stoic void as stretching to infinity, like empty space with no matter as we conceive it; a less orthodox view indicates that the Void may have been neither infinite nor finite, but merely indeterminate or undefined.  This week, we will discuss which of these conceptions of void are more plausible, whether that was actually what the Stoics may have thought, and what implications these theories would have on one's view of the universe as a whole (or, as the Stoics called it, "The All").