Marion Durand

Depuis 1973 et l’œuvre phare de Charles Kahn, The Verb to be in Ancient Greek, les chercheurs en philosophie antique se sont penchés sur la question du verbe « être » (einai), notamment chez Parménide, Platon et Aristote, mais relativement peu d’attention s’est portée sur les stoïciens. Cet article suggère que les sources stoïciennes pourraient pourtant contribuer aux débats sur ce sujet, non seulement parce qu’elles peuvent conforter certaines des interprétations actuelles mais surtout parce que les stoïciens eux-mêmes semblent être sensibles aux complexités du verbe et ce de manières surprenantes et révélatrices. En effet, alors qu’ils avaient à leur disposition un moyen de distinguer les usages syntactiquement complets et incomplets d’einai, ils ne semblent pas l’avoir fait, mais ils pourraient avoir par ailleurs distingué différents usages pour des raisons sémantiques, notamment en isolant et en écartant le sens dit véridique et certains emplois à valeur existentielle. De même, bien qu’ils distinguent les prédications universelles des prédications particulières, ils ne semblent pas différencier les phrases d’identité d’autres formules prédicatives, ce qui, il est suggéré, pourrait se justifier au vu d’autres doctrines de leur système philosophique.

Mates’s Puzzle has flown below many philosophers’ radar, despite its relations to both Frege’s Puzzle and the Paradox of Analysis. We explain the relations amongst these puzzles on the way to arguing that Mates’s Puzzle suggests a generalization of Frege’s Puzzle, and of the sense-reference distinction itself, in the form of hierarchy of senses. We explain how Mates’s Puzzle and the hierarchy, to different degrees, illuminate each other, and how their connection is missed in the literature. However, we argue that the potential of Mates’s Puzzle to illuminate the hierarchy is yet to be fully actualised. We suggest that in order to do better, we need to formulate Mates’s Puzzle as a puzzle in the philosophy of thought and not as puzzle in the philosophy of language. What is needed, to which the present paper is a precursor, is an account of the cognitive significance of higher-order senses.

This paper reconstructs the Stoic theory of deixis in order to explain the importance placed by the Stoics on demonstrative pronouns and the so-called definite propositions they compose. I argue that these propositions are privileged by the Stoics on both ontological and epistemological grounds because of the semantic properties of their subjects. They are firstly privileged on ontological grounds because their subjects, which refer by deixis alone, bear a privileged relationship to matter, the most fundamental ontological category. In addition, they require the immediate graspability of their referent. Secondly, deictic expressions are privileged on epistemological grounds because they compose the most epistemologically fundamental propositions. Not all apparently demonstrative expressions will fulfil these requirements. I therefore also consider what constitutes a deictic expression for the Stoics – arguing that anaphora, for example, does not – and exactly how deixis secures reference, suggesting that, by contrast with what has traditionally been assumed, pointing is neither necessary nor sufficient.