Philosophy
c. 135 BC to c. 51 BC, Apamea, Syria
The last great polymath of the Stoa, who measured the sun, mapped the tides, and read the whole cosmos as one living, connected whole.
Start learning Posidonius →Posidonius of Apamea - the one man who measured the sun, mapped the tides, wrote fifty-two books of history, and taught Cicero and Pompey - held that philosophy and the sciences are not rivals but one connected inquiry:…
Against the founding Stoic doctrine that emotions are simply mistaken judgments, Posidonius argued that the soul has genuinely irrational powers - so that curing the passions takes more than correcting beliefs. To make…
Posidonius held that the universe is a single living being whose parts are bound together in sympatheia - cosmic sympathy - so that a change in one answers a change in another across vast distances. His proof was the ti…
Posidonius turned his cosmic piety into hard measurement: he estimated the size and distance of the sun, took the measure of the earth’s circumference, mapped its zones and peoples, and traced the tides. One of hi…
In one of philosophy’s most famous debates about technology, Posidonius argued that the arts of civilization - building, weaving, metalworking, even the plough - were the inventions of philosophers, of wise men ap…
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