ABSTRACT
As in theory of knowledge, so in physics the Epicurean and Stoic systems are both similar and different. They have in common a belief that reality is, in broad terms, to be identified with what is bodily or corporeal – with material reality as we might say, though the associations of that term are likely to be misleading especially where the Stoics are concerned. The two schools share the same basic argument for restricting reality to bodies, and the same philosophical problems that ‘materialism’ brings, above all those of accounting for mind and consciousness (though this is more true of the Epicureans than of the Stoics, for reasons that we shall see). But the accounts they give of the nature of body are in certain respects diametrically opposed to one another. (The Sceptics will not figure in the present chapter at all – naturally enough, given that the Academic sceptics had no definite views on such matters, and the Pyrrhonian sceptics claimed to have no views on anything at all.)
