Abstract
Stoic Kinds of Causes
In Ancient and Hellenistic philosophy, it is accepted that "nothing occurs causelessly". Considering this proposal together with the claim of Metaphysics, "it is when we think that we understand its primary cause that we claim to know each particular thing’’, it is clear that for philosophers of the Ancient and Hellenistic ages, the existence without the cause is ontologically and epistemologically impossible. Aristotle's “theory of the four causes" is probably the first systematic effort to remove this impossibility. However, Stoicism put forward a different theory about the causes asserting ‘’both less and more’’ causes than the Aristotelian four causes theory. This study aims at discussing how Stoic physics founds this issue considering the "universal" and “immanence" views. The focus of this study is the types of phenomena that work in the Stoic universe and the relations between them. Thus, the nature of Stoic determinism will be revealed.
Keywords
Stoic physics, ontology, cause, effect, determinism.
