Abstract

Philosophy was based on dualism.The opposition of mind to matter, of soul to body spans near to the whole history of philosophy, including materialist doctrines. But instead of this dualism which brought classical philosophy to an impasse, there was another way : the Stoic one. According to Stoics, soul is body, thought is embodied, without any commitment to materialism, since the universe is teleological as a whole. This solution, which may look artifi­cial, appears perfectly coherent indeed in the light of an information metaphysics that helps to substantiate what was taken until now for gratuitous subtleties. Cosmos is structured like a language, i.e. a meaning encoded into a material medium.