Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2025
This chapter brings together the theory of conflagration and the theories of everlasting recurrence that embrace Identity, and draws a paradox from their combination: the ‘paradox of destruction and restoration’. If the new cosmos is wholly type-identical to the old one, would it not be more rational for the Stoic god not to destroy the latter in the first place? The idea of a conflagration followed by the restoration of a type-identical cosmos seems to threaten the rationality of the Stoic god. In this chapter, I explain how, on my view, the Stoic god is immune to this objection.
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