Vanessa de Harven

This paper argues that for the Stoics, existence (einai, to on, ousia) is the ontological status of bodies, and subsistence (hupostasis, huphistanai) is the ontological status of the incorporeals (place, void, time, and the lekta, or sayables), while obtaining (huparxis, huparchein) is not an ontological status at all — hence I italicize the first two, and not the last. All the incorporeals are said to subsist, but only true lekta and the present time are said to obtain, in contrast not only to false lekta and the past and future, but also in contrast to the other incorporeals, which are never said to obtain. Matters are complicated by the fact that “huparxis” and “huparchein” have ordinary language senses of existing and of being actual. But given the Stoics’ technical use of the most common verb, “to be,” to signal the ontological status of bodies, there is reason to think that “huparchein” is also used in a technical sense. And given that the term is applied only to true lekta and the present time, there is reason to think not only that this technical sense is not the ontological status of all the incorporeals, but that it is not an ontological status or mode of being at all. It is, rather, a relation to the world as it is. When the present time is said to obtain, this is not an alternative to the subsistence of time, but a correspondence to the world as (i.e. when) it is unfolding. And when a lekton is true and therefore obtains, it is not getting actualized or coming to exist, but corresponding to the world as (i.e. in the manner that) it is — just as one would expect from the Stoics’ correspondence theory of truth. Thus the incorporeals all have just the one mode of being or ontological status, subsistence, and only bodies exist.

This chapter considers the status of the PSR for the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as falling along a spectrum of attitudes to the demand for explanation. The PSR is strongest with the Stoics, but also limited by their brute commitment to two eternal, ungenerated, and fundamental principles that are the source and explanation for everything there is. With the Epicureans, the PSR is strong yet limited in similar ways, by the fundamentality of the atoms and eternality of their motion, but also much more severely blunted by the famous doctrine of the swerve, according to which atoms veer off at uncertain times and places. Finally, with the skeptics there is a tantalizing tension between the pervasive use of the PSR to undermine all dogma and the application of the PSR to itself, so that there is no more reason to endorse this guiding skeptical principle itself than to reject it.

Everything is Something is a book about Stoic metaphysics. It argues that the Stoics were sophisticated metaphysical thinkers responding to Plato’s Sophist and forging a bold new path between materialism and idealism, with a one-world metaphysics best characterized as non-reductive physicalism. The book is divided into five sections. Section I, Something, develops the suggestion that the Stoics arrived at the genus Something and their two ontological criteria for being Something by careful reflection on Plato’s Sophist, finding new depth to Plato’s challenges as well as to the Stoic response. Section II, Bodies, offers an account of Stoic corporealism that takes us from the ontology of what exists to the metaphysics of body, how body is the fundamental grounds of the cosmos, and how qualities can be corporeal. Section III, Incorporeals, takes us beyond corporealism to physicalism. It argues that the Stoic incorporeals—space, time, and the lekta, or sayables—are all dependent on body for their subsistence, inheriting their spatial, temporal, and semantic properties from underlying body without being nothing but the body. Section IV, Neither Corporeal nor Incorporeal, argues in support of a tripartite ontology that includes a third class of entities that are neither corporeal nor incorporeal—limits of the continuum, geometrical limits, and creatures of fiction. Section V, Everything, returns to the Stoic ontology, arguing that concepts are not Something, thus no reason remains to posit a further class of entities, Not-Somethings (outina), in metaphysical limbo between Something and nothing at all. The genus Something is complete and comprehensive as it stands. Everything is Something.

The Stoics have often been compared to the earthborn Giants in the Battle of Gods and Giants in Plato’s Sophist, but with diverging opinions about the lessons they drew in reaction to Plato. At issue are questions about what in the Sophist the Stoics were reacting to, how the Stoics are like and unlike the Giants, the status of being for the Stoics, and the extent to which they were Platonizing with their incorporeals. With these open questions in mind, I reexamine the Sophist from the Stoic perspective, finding eight distinct challenges that are likely to have been salient to the Stoics, and offer a new account of the Stoics as responding to these challenges with an innovative ontology that prises apart something from being to make room for what is not, and a sophisticated one-world metaphysics that grounds everything there is in two fundamental bodies.

The Stoics are famously committed to the thesis that only bodies are, and for this reason they are rightly called “corporealists.” They are also famously compared to Plato’s earthborn Giants in the Sophist, and rightly so given their steadfast commitment to body as being. But the Stoics also notoriously turn the tables on Plato and coopt his “dunamis proposal” that being is whatever can act or be acted upon to underwrite their commitment to body rather than shrink from it as the Giants do. The substance of Stoic corporealism, however, has not been fully appreciated. This paper argues that Stoic corporealism goes beyond the dunamis proposal, which is simply an ontological criterion for being, to the metaphysics of body. This involves, first, an account of body as metaphysically simple and hence fundamental; second, an account of body as malleable and continuous, hence fit for blending (krasis di’ holou) and composition. In addition, the metaphysics of body involves a distinction between this composition relation seen in the cosmology, and the constitution relation by which the four-fold schema called the Stoic Categories proceeds, e.g. the relation between a statue and its clay, or a fist and its underlying hand. It has not been appreciated that the cosmology and the Categories are distinct — and complementary — explanatory enterprises, the one accounting for generation and unity, the other taking those individuals once generated, and giving a mereological analysis of their identity and persistence conditions, kinds, and qualities. The result is an elegant division of Plato’s labor from the Battle of Gods and Giants. On the one hand, the Stoics rehabilitate the crude cosmology of the Presocratics to deliver generation and unity in completely corporeal terms, and that work is found in their Physics. On the other hand, they reform the Giants and “dare to corporealize,” delivering all manner of predication (from identity to the virtues), and that work is found in Stoic Logic. Recognizing the distinctness of these explanatory enterprises helps dissolve scholarly puzzles, and harmonizes the Stoics with themselves.

This paper rehabilitates the Stoic conception of blending from the ground up, by freeing the Stoic conception of body from three interpretive presuppositions. First, the twin hylomorphic presuppositions that where there is body there is matter, and that where there is reason or quality there is an incorporeal. Then, the atomistic presupposition that body is absolutely full and rigid, and the attendant notion that resistance (antitupia) must be ricochet. I argue that once we clear away these presuppositions about body, the foundations of Stoic corporealism fall into place. Body is fundamental (not hylomorphic). The two fundamental principles (archai) are bodies: divine active reason (logos) and passive matter (hulē); and these two bodies are two, not matter and form all over again, nor actual and potential, but agent and patient. The independence of the two archai is no threat to the unity of the cosmos, however, because the Stoic theory of body allows for the complete coextension of the archai. The hylomorphic thinker rightly asks, what relation could be tighter than that of the wax and its shape? The Stoic replies: a causal relation, the interaction of agent and patient completely coextended in a through and through blend.

This paper seeks to elucidate the distinctive nature of the rational impression on its own terms, asking precisely what it means for the Stoics to define logikē phantasia as an impression whose content is expressible in language. I argue first that impression, generically, is direct and reflexive awareness of the world, the way animals get information about their surroundings. Then, that the rational impression, specifically, is inherently conceptual, inferential, and linguistic, i.e. thick with propositional content, the way humans receive incoming information from the world. When we suspend certain contemporary assumptions about propositional content, the textual evidence can be taken at face value to reveal why, for the Stoics, rational impressions are called thoughts (noēseis) and how the Stoics’ novel semantic entities called lekta (roughly, the meanings of our words) depend on rational impressions for their subsistence.

In his exciting new book, Plato’s Anti-hedonism and the Protagoras, J. Clerk Shaw paints a masterful portrait of the Athenian majority, or “the many,” as portrayed by Plato not just in the Protagoras (as the title advertises), but throughout the Platonic corpus. Shaw offers an incisive diagnosis of popular “double-think,” which balances the incoherent complex of commitments to hedonism (the view the pleasure is the good), to the possibility of akrasia (weakness of will) and to the belief that injustice is prudent, i.e. in one’s own self-interest to do. Shaw also puts the dialectical context of the Protagoras to good use in identifying the double-talk that Protagoras is forced into by his own conflicting claims and commitments. The central thesis I question is that the sophists have internalized the opinions of the many, thus absorbing conventional morality as their own as opposed to waking the tightrope of popular opinion. Certainly the sophists’ currency is the opinions of the many, reflecting their own views back to them, and this creates difficulties and tensions in their stances (not least because they are reflecting the incoherent double-think that Shaw so beautifully brings out). However, all this can be true independently of the possibility of the sophists’ actually internalizing the views of the many, i.e. without speculating about their psychology at all. I argue that this thesis of Shaw’s is not necessary for his core insights about the many, and (likewise) that we can resist two other interpretative moves he makes. Shaw’s readings of the Protagoras—of Socrates as committed to spirit (thumos), and of the argument that akrasia is ignorance and courage is wisdom as independent of the commitment to hedonis—reveal his sympathies for a so-called “unitarian” interpretation of Plato, which takes the corpus to provide a unified doctrine rather than reflecting the author’s intellectual development. Here too, I suggest, Shaw’s insights can be preserved without running afoul of this interpretive disagreement.

At the heart of the Stoic theory of modality is a strict commitment to bivalence, even for future contingents. A commitment to both future truth and contingency has often been thought paradoxical. This paper argues that the Stoic retreat from necessity is successful. it maintains that the Stoics recognized three distinct senses of necessity and possibility: logical, metaphysical and providential. Logical necessity consists of truths that are knowable a priori. Metaphysical necessity consists of truths that are knowable a posteriori, a world order according to certain metaphysical principles and natures that god crafts within the constraints of matter. Finally, what is providentially necessary is what occurs according to the chain of fate, but only once it is in process or past. The method of the paper is a close reading of Diogenes Laertius 7.75, adducing broad textual evidence along the way, to show that the Stoic theory of modality embraces Philonian possibility, both that which is capable of being true as a matter of logical consistency, and that which is possible according to the bare fitness of the entity. What differentiates the Stoics from Philo is their additional commitment to possibility as opportunity, resisting the collapse of determinism into necessity.