Aither is a double-blind peer review, Open Access online academic journal. It is indexed at ERIH+ and Scopus. It is published by the Faculty of Arts of the Palacký University in Olomouc in cooperation with the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It comes out twice a year. Every second issue is international and contains foreign-language articles (mainly in English, but also in German and French). The journal is registered under the number ISSN 1803-7860.

Aither 28/2022 (International issue no. 10):50-81 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2023.004

The Stoic Conception of Bodily Beauty as Symmetry

Ota Gál
Institute of Philosophy
Czech Academy of Sciences

This paper provides an interpretation of the Stoic notion of bodily beauty as the symmetry of parts with respect to one another and to the whole. Symmetry is caused by the structuring activity of the rational spirit in multiplicity, making the beautiful thing an ordered whole. This is true for particular bodies in the world and, even more so, for the cosmos as a particular world order. I follow some traces in Stoic texts suggesting that this is also (and a fortiori) true for the cosmos, in the sense of God in conflagration, which somehow represents symmetry in its purest state.

Received: August 12, 2022; Revised: December 22, 2022; Accepted: February 21, 2023; Published: March 7, 2023  Show citation

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Gál, O. (2022). The Stoic Conception of Bodily Beauty as Symmetry. Aither, 14(28), 50-81. doi: 10.5507/aither.2023.004
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