250ZENO OF ELEA
Stoic school in Athens. As a Stoic, Zeno
advocated “a good flow of life,” and con-
cerned himself with practical philosophy.
According to Diogenes Laertius, Zeno
was a pantheist who held that the uni-
verse and God were identical. (He also
names God as “fate,” “unity,” and “mind,”
among other things.) The aim of life,
then, is to live in accord with the universe,
which one does by practicing the virtues
and giving assent only to those proposi-
tions that merit it by their stability. Zeno
viewed philosophy as a system, and gave
logic a high place in the Stoic system.
Zeno viewed reality as composed of a
passive element, matter, and an active one,
the logos, reason. The divine logos is the
principle of change, and matter is the sub-
strate in which that change occurs. The
cosmos undergoes precisely the same
changes again and again eternally, gov-
erned by the logos, and activated by the
fire that permeates the cosmos. The fire
in the cosmos corresponds to the pneuma
in the human body. His doctrine of the
soul, therefore, appears to be materialist.
Zeno was reputedly a prolific writer, but
none of his writings survive. See also
PNEUMA and STOICISM.
ZENO OF ELEA (c. 490–c. 430 BCE).
Philosopher, follower of Parmenides,
famed for his paradoxes designed to show
that motion is impossible. A student of
Parmenides, Zeno’s work was designed to
establish that there is only unchanging
being. His most famous paradox concerns
the impossibility of completing an infi-
nite sequence of movements. For you to
cross a field with a border you must go
halfway. Then you must go another quar-
ter of the distance. Then you must go
another fraction of the distance and so
on, ad infinitum. Given this formulation
of the problem of motion, you would
never get to the other side of the field.ZHANG DONGSUN (1886–1973).
Zhang Dongsun was a Chinese philoso-
pher, translator, and political figure.
Zhang sought to integrate the insights of
Kant into modern Confucianism. He also
was a proponent of both the metaphysics
of Henri Bergson and the ideas of
Bertrand Russell, finding no contradic-
tion between the two. Zhang, a professor
at Yenching University in Beijing, became
a prominent liberal critic of the National-
ist regime of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang
Kai-shek) and was a leader of the China
Democratic League. Zhang was impris-
oned during the Japanese occupation of
Beijing in World War II. In 1949 he helped
negotiate the peaceful occupation of the
city by the Chinese Communists. After
the establishment of the Communist
regime Zhang was forced into retirement.ZHANG ZAI (a.k.a. CHANG TSAI)
(1020–1077). Zhang Zai was an early
Neo-Confucian cosmologist and moral
philosopher. Disillusioned with classical
Confucianism, Zhang explored Buddhism