Stoicism: The System

Logic, physics, ethics — the three parts the internet threw away, and whether the practice survives without them.

A course on the thought of The Stoics.

What you will learn

• State the medical analogy and what it makes of the emotions.
• Distinguish philosophy from philosophical discourse.
• See why the Stoics still built an enormous theory despite all this.
• Name the three parts and how much wider each is than its modern namesake.
• Compare the egg, orchard and animal similes and what each implies.
• Judge what is lost when the ethics is taught alone.
• Explain why Stoic logic is epistemology and not only formal argument.
• State the problem of the criterion and the Stoic answer to it.

Course outline

1. Not a Subject: Philosophy as an Art — Before any of the doctrine, the thing the doctrine is for. Chrysippus called philosophy an art of medicine for the soul — and unlike the other medicine, it is one you can only ever practise on…
2. Three Parts, One Animal — Logic, physics, ethics. The Stoics gave three pictures of how they fit together, and quarrelled about which picture was safe — because the wrong one lets you walk off with a third of the system under…
3. Logic: Which Impressions Can Be Trusted — You were told to examine your impressions. Examine them by what? That question is logic, and without an answer the first discipline is an instruction with nothing inside it.
4. Physics: One World, and It Is Alive — The Stoic cosmos is a single living material thing, and God is not outside it. Everything the practice asks of you was resting on that — which is awkward, because it is not true.
5. Fate, and What Is Still Yours — Every cause depends on an earlier cause. So in what sense was anything ever up to you? The cylinder is Chrysippus's answer, and you should decide whether it works.
6. The Sage, and the Rest of Us — Everything the system was built to produce is one person, and the Stoics doubted he had ever existed. Chrysippus said the rest of us are drowning — and that being a cubit from the surface is no help…

Works read in this course

• Discourses — Epictetus teaching at Nicopolis, written down by his student Arrian — Epictetus published nothing himself
• Encheiridion — the Handbook: Arrian's short digest of the same teaching, including the three parts of philosophy at 51
• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius's private notebook — the source for applying Physic, Ethic and Dialectic to a single impression
• Moral Letters to Lucilius — Seneca to Lucilius; Letter 89 is his survey of the parts of philosophy, Letter 107 renders Cleanthes' hymn
• Natural Questions — Seneca on earthquakes, lightning and comets — the Stoic physics, and the book of his that nobody reads
• On Providence — Seneca's answer to why evils befall good men; the flat statement of the chain of causes
• On the Firmness of the Wise Man — Seneca on the sage — and he puts the objection that no such man exists into his opponent's mouth
• (lost) Chrysippus, On Ends, On Fate and the rest — the man who built the system wrote over 700 books; not one survives whole. The cylinder reaches us only through Aulus Gellius
• (secondary, authoring-only) Sellars, Stoicism (2006) — the scholarly frame this course is built on — not ingested, not quoted

Terms introduced

katalepsis, pneuma, logos, ekpyrosis, heimarmene, pronoia, prokope, sophos, physis, dialektike, askesis

Part of the Simposeum course library.