The theory of mental models is a current cognitive approach trying to describe the way people make inferences. According to this theory, people reason from possibilities or models linked to sentences. Sometimes, such possibilities or models are transformed by the action of a semantic modulation. The point this paper is intended to make is that Stoic logic also has the machinery to explain semantic processes such as that of modulation. This is shown by means of the criterion Chrysippus of (...) Soli provided for conditional sentences and the theory of sign related to that criterion. (shrink)

We argue that the extant evidence for Stoic logic provides all the elements required for a variable-free theory of multiple generality, including a number of remarkably modern features that straddle logic and semantics, such as the understanding of one- and two-place predicates as functions, the canonical formulation of universals as quantified conditionals, a straightforward relation between elements of propositional and first-order logic, and the roles of anaphora and rigid order in the regimented sentences that express multiply general propositions. (...) We consider and reinterpret some ancient texts that have been neglected in the context of Stoic universal and existential propositions and offer new explanations of some puzzling features in Stoic logic. Our results confirm that Stoic logic surpasses Aristotle’s with regard to multiple generality, and are a reminder that focusing on multiple generality through the lens of Frege-inspired variable-binding quantifier theory may hamper our understanding and appreciation of pre-Fregean theories of multiple generality. (shrink)

Cet article vise à comprendre la théorie stoïcienne de la deixis afin d’expliquer l’importance accordée par les stoïciens aux pronoms démonstratifs et aux énoncés qu’ils composent, c’est-à-dire les propositions dites définitives. Nous montrons que ces propositions sont privilégiées pour des raisons à la fois ontologiques et épistémologiques en raison des propriétés sémantiques de leur sujet. Elles sont privilégiées d’un point de vue ontologique parce que la deixis grâce à laquelle leur sujet fait référence au réel crée une relation privilégiée à (...) la matière, la catégorie ontologique stoïcienne fondamentale. De plus, ces sujets requièrent que leur référent existe et soit présent et saisissable. Ces énoncés sont d’autre part privilégiés d’un point de vue épistémologique parce qu’ils sont fondamentaux dans l’acquisition de la connaissance. Nous suggérons enfin que tous les énoncés apparemment définis ne le sont pas en effet, et considérons quand et sous quelles conditions une référence déictique est réussie. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Among Foucault’s works on the “techniques of the self,” the importance of the Stoic doctrine of cura sui is testified by a number of essays such as The Care of the Self and The Hermeneutics of the Subject. In line with Foucault’s biopolitical thought throughout the 1970s, my core argument in this paper is that some authors of the Italian Theory develop their account of contemporary neoliberalism through the interpretation of cura sui as a form of self-enterprise. Thus, I (...) compare certain passages of late imperial Stoicism with contemporary critical literature in order to demonstrate that a certain semantic contiguity led to an interpretation of the technologies of the self that is quite different from Foucault’s original purpose, and their ethical outcomes in the domain of self-entrepreneurship suffer from a substantial ambiguity.L’importance de la doctrine stoïque de la cura sui dans les études foucaldiennes sur les « techniques du soi»s’affirme par des ouvrages tels que Le souci de soi et l’Herméneutique du sujet. Dans le sillage de la pensée biopolitique de Foucault à la fin des années 1970, la thèse que je développe dans ce texte est que certains auteurs de l’Italian Theory, dans leur lecture du présent néolibéral, ont rapproché la question classique de la cura sui à celle de l’auto-entrepreneuriat. Dans cette perspective, je fais une comparaison de certains passages du stoïcisme impérial tardif à la littérature critique contemporaine, afin de démontrer que une certaine contiguïté sémantique a conduit à une interprétation des technologies du soi assez différente des intentions originaires de Foucault et que leur finalité éthique, à propos de l'auto-entrepreneuriat, confirme son ambiguïté de fond. (shrink)

Everything is Something is a book about Stoic metaphysics. It argues that the Stoics are best understood as forging a bold new path between materialism and idealism, a path best characterized as non-reductive physicalism. To be sure, only individual bodies exist for the Stoics, but not everything there is exists — some things are said to subsist. However, this is no Meinongian move beyond existence, to the philosophy of intentionality (as the language of subsistence might suggest), but a one-world (...) metaphysics that both counts its entities by logical criteria, and grounds them in body by physical principles, yielding a tightly ordered ontology in which everything is Something and nothing is not. -/- This last phrase is not innocent. It invokes the Stoic innovation of Something (ti) as the highest genus of reality, and takes the stand that it is not only principled and coherent, but comprehensive — anything that is not Something is nothing at all (for the initiated: there is no class of Not-Somethings between Something and nothing). Further, everything that is Something is either itself a body, or ontologically dependent on body. Herein lies the Stoics’ non-reductive physicalism, and the beating heart of their response to the Battle of Gods and Giants in Plato’s Sophist: a one-world metaphysics. -/- The foundation of Stoic metaphysics is their ground-breaking corporealism, which introduces an alternative to both atomism and hylomorphism. The Stoics are continuum physicists for whom body as such, i.e. solid, three-dimensional extension, is homogeneous, partless, uniform, and infinitely divisible without reaching minima (atoms). And because body is not conceived along hylomorphic lines, i.e. as a composite of matter and form, the Stoics are free to make body fundamental. Out of two basic bodies, then (the archai), and by the tantalizing mechanism of through and through blending (krasis di’ holou), Stoic physics constructs the cosmos (and every body it contains) in completely corporealist terms, composing one thing out of many. And once those bodies are built, Stoic logic gives an account of their identity conditions, kinds, and qualities according to the vexed schema of the Categories, making now many out of one by the constitution relation, as a statue is constituted by its clay. With these distinct mereological relations of composition and constitution, Stoic corporealism artfully divides the labor of Plato’s Forms between physics and logic. -/- Next in the ontological order, with bodies as their foundation, are the incorporeals (asōmata): space (place, room, and surface), time, void, and the (awkwardly named) sayables, or lekta (roughly, though controversially, the meanings of our words). These entities do not exist; they do, however, subsist, inheriting their physical properties and, hence, their subsistence, from the bodies on which they depend. For example, place depends for its three-dimensional (non-solid) extension on the bodies that occupy or delimit it. The ontological dependence of space, time, and their novel semantic entities (the lekta) on body, is what takes Stoic metaphysics beyond corporealism to non-reductive physicalism, beyond a merely sorted ontology to an ordered, one-world metaphysics. Each incorporeal counts as Something according to the Stoic criterion for subsistence (hence, the theory is non-reductive), and what they have in common as incorporeals (and what makes the account physicalist), is their dependence on underlying body. -/- In addition to the incorporeals, the Stoics also recognize the subsistence of things like creatures of fiction and geometrical limits, which they classify as neither corporeal nor incorporeal. What these entities have in common is that they are products of thought; and since thoughts are themselves bodies according to Stoic corporealism, this remains a physicalist account. As before, the account is not Meinongian; neither all objects of thought, nor all products of thought count as Something. Indeed, the Stoics’ eliminative treatment of universals (and Forms) turns on their denying concepts (ennoēmata) a place on the ontological map altogether — concepts are simply not Somethings (and, again, not some further category of Not-Somethings, intermediate between Something and nothing at all). If all this is right, then the Stoics are not flat-footed materialists or ersatz Platonists, as so often assumed, but our first non-reductive physicalists. (shrink)

The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus wrote extensively on the liar paradox, but unfortunately the extant testimony on his response to the paradox is meager and mainly hostile. Modern scholars, beginning with Alexander Rüstow in the first decade of the twentieth century, have attempted to reconstruct Chrysippus? solution. Rüstow argued that Chrysippus advanced a cassationist solution, that is, one in which sentences such as ?I am speaking falsely? do not express propositions. Two more recent scholars, Walter Cavini and Mario Mignucci, have (...) rejected Rüstow's thesis that Chrysippus used a cassationist approach. Each has proposed his own thesis about Chrysippus? solution. I argue that Rüstow's view is fundamentally correct, and that the cassationist thesis gains greater plausibility when viewed in light of a passage in Sextus Empiricus? Adversus mathematicos that the previous commentators have ignored, and when understood within the broader context of Stoic logical theory and philosophy of language. I close with a brief remark on the significance of Chrysippus? work for the modern debate on the semantic paradoxes. (shrink)

This article is about the conception of truth and signification in Augustine's early philosophical writings. In the first, semantic-linguistic part, the gradual shift of Augustine's position towards the Academics is treated closely. It reveals that Augustine develops a notion of sign which, by integrating elements of Stoic epistemology, is suited to function as a transmitter of true knowledge through linguistic expressions. In the second part, both the ontological structure of signified (sensible) things and Augustine's solution to the apparent tautologies (...) of mathematical truths are examined. Again his notion of sign turns out to be the keystone; this time, however, the natural in contrast to the conventional sign of linguistic expressions. In their complementarity, both parts show how Augustine intensely struggles with and (partially) overcomes the skepticism of the sensible world through his conception of sign and signification. (shrink)

Augustine famously claims every word is a name. Some readers take Augustine to thereby maintain a purely referentialist semantic account according to which every word is a referential expression whose meaning is its extension. Other readers think that Augustine is no referentialist and is merely claiming that every word has some meaning. In this paper, I clarify Augustine’s arguments to the effect that every word is a name and argue that ‘every word is a name’ amounts to the claim that (...) for any word, there exist tokens of that word which are autonymous nouns. Augustine takes this to be the result of universal lexical ambiguity or equivocity and I clarify how Augustine’s account of metalinguistic discourse, which is one of the most detailed to have survived from antiquity, differs from some ancient and modern theories. (shrink)

The last 14 chapters of book 1 of Aristotle's "Prior Analytics" are concerned with the representation in the formal language of syllogistic of propositions and arguments expressed in more or less everyday Greek. In his commentary on those chapters, Alexander of Aphrodisias explains some of Aristotle's more opaque assertions and discusses post-Aristotelian ideas in semantics and the philosophy of language. In doing so he provides an unusual insight into the way in which these disciplines developed in the Hellenistic era. (...) He also shows a more sophisticated understanding of these fields than Aristotle himself, while remaining a staunch defender of Aristotle's emphasis on meaning as opposed to Stoics concern with verbal formulation. In his commentary on the final chapter of book 1 Alexander offers a thorough discussion of Aristotle's distinction between denying that something is, e.g., white and asserting that it is non-white. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: A comprehensive introduction to ancient (western) logic from earliest times to the 6th century CE, with an emphasis on topics which may be of interest to contemporary logicians. Content: 1. Pre-Aristotelian Logic 1.1 Syntax and Semantics 1.2 Argument Patterns and Valid Inference 2. Aristotle 2.1 Dialectics 2.2 Sub-sentential Classifications 2.3 Syntax and Semantics of Sentences 2.4 Non-modal Syllogistic 2.5 Modal Logic 3. The early Peripatetics: Theophrastus and Eudemus 3.1 Improvements and Modifications of Aristotle's Logic 3.2 Prosleptic Syllogisms (...) 3.3 Forerunners of Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens 3.4 Wholly Hypothetical Syllogisms 4. Diodorus Cronus and Philo the Logician 5. The Stoics 5.1 Logical Achievements Besides Propositional Logic 5.2 Syntax and Semantics of Complex Propositions 5.3 Arguments 5.4 Stoic Syllogistic 5.5 Logical Paradoxes 6. Epicurus and the Epicureans 7. Later Antiquity. (shrink)

This paper develops the idea that valid arguments are equivalent to true conditionals by combining Kripke’s theory of truth with the evidential account of conditionals offered by Crupi and Iacona. As will be shown, in a first-order language that contains a naïve truth predicate and a suitable conditional, one can define a validity predicate in accordance with the thesis that the inference from a conjunction of premises to a conclusion is valid when the corresponding conditional is true. The validity predicate (...) so defined significantly increases our expressive resources and provides a coherent formal treatment of paradoxical arguments. (shrink)

Commentators have not said much regarding Berkeley and Stoicism. Even when they do, they generally limit their remarks to Berkeley’s Siris (1744) where he invokes characteristically Stoic themes about the World Soul, “seminal reasons,” and the animating fire of the universe. The Stoic heritage of other Berkeleian doctrines (e.g., about mind or the semiotic character of nature) is seldom recognized, and when it is, little is made of it in explaining his other doctrines (e.g., immaterialism). None of this (...) is surprising, considering how Stoics are considered arch-materialists and determinists. My aim is to suggest that our understanding of Berkeley’s philosophy is improved significantly by acknowledging its underlying Stoic character. I argue that Berkeley proposes not only a semantic ontology based on assumptions of Stoic logic but also a doctrine in which perceptions or ideas are intelligible precisely because they are always embedded in the propositions of a discourse or language. (shrink)

The meaning of definite descriptions (like ‘the King of France’, ‘the girl’, etc.) has been a central topic in philosophy and linguistics for the past century. Indefinites (‘Something is on the floor’, ‘A child sat down’, etc.) have been relatively neglected in philosophy, under the Russellian assumption that they can be unproblematically treated as existential quantifiers. However, an important tradition, drawing from Stoic logic, has pointed to patterns which suggest that indefinites cannot be treated simply as existential quantifiers. The (...) standard dynamic semantic treatment of those phenomena, however, has well-known problems with negation and disjunction. -/- In this paper I develop a new approach to (in)definites. On my theory, truth-conditions are classical. But in addition to truth-conditions, meanings comprise a second dimension of what I call bounds. It is at the level of bounds, not truth-conditions, that I locate the characteristically dynamic coordination between indefinites and definites. The resulting system thus has a classical logic. This approach avoids dynamic semantics’ logical problems, and, more generally, yields a new perspective on the relation between truth-conditional and dynamic effects in natural language. (shrink)

In ancient philosophy, there is no discipline called “logic” in the contemporary sense of “the study of formally valid arguments.” Rather, once a subfield of philosophy comes to be called “logic,” namely in Hellenistic philosophy, the field includes (among other things) epistemology, normative epistemology, philosophy of language, the theory of truth, and what we call logic today. This entry aims to examine ancient theorizing that makes contact with the contemporary conception. Thus, we will here emphasize the theories of the “syllogism” (...) in the Aristotelian and Stoic traditions. However, because the context in which these theories were developed and discussed were deeply epistemological in nature, we will also include references to the areas of epistemological theorizing that bear directly on theories of the syllogism, particularly concerning “demonstration.” Similarly, we will include literature that discusses the principles governing logic and the components that make up arguments, which are topics that might now fall under the headings of philosophy of logic or non-classical logic. This includes discussions of problems and paradoxes that connect to contemporary logic and which historically spurred developments of logical method. For example, there is great interest among ancient philosophers in the question of whether all statements have truth-values. Relevant themes here include future contingents, paradoxes of vagueness, and semantic paradoxes like the liar. We also include discussion of the paradoxes of the infinite for similar reasons, since solutions have introduced sophisticated tools of logical analysis and there are a range of related, modern philosophical concerns about the application of some logical principles in infinite domains. Our criterion excludes, however, many of the themes that Hellenistic philosophers consider part of logic, in particular, it excludes epistemology and metaphysical questions about truth. Ancient philosophers do not write treatises “On Logic,” where the topic would be what today counts as logic. Instead, arguments and theories that count as “logic” by our criterion are found in a wide range of texts. For the most part, our entry follows chronology, tracing ancient logic from its beginnings to Late Antiquity. However, some themes are discussed in several eras of ancient logic; ancient logicians engage closely with each other’s views. Accordingly, relevant publications address several authors and periods in conjunction. These contributions are listed in three thematic sections at the end of our entry. (shrink)

In his Contra Academicos, Augustine offers one of the most detailed responses to scepticism to have come down to us from antiquity. In this paper, I examine Augustine’s defence of the existence of infallible knowledge in Contra Academicos 3. I challenge a number of established views (including those of Myles Burnyeat, Gareth Matthews, and Christopher Kirwan) concerning the nature and merit of Augustine’s defence of knowledge and propose a new understanding of Augustine’s response to scepticism (including his semantic response to (...) external world scepticism) and several important elements of Augustine’s thought concerning signification, cognition, and object-directed thought. I argue that once we properly understand Augustine’s views about these issues, his arguments in defence of knowledge are more interesting and more successful than usually thought. (shrink)

The syllogistic figures and moods can be taken to be argument schemata as can the rules of the Stoic propositional logic. Sentence schemata have been used in axiomatizations of logic only since the landmark 1927 von Neumann paper [31]. Modern philosophers know the role of schemata in explications of the semantic conception of truth through Tarski’s 1933 Convention T [42]. Mathematical logicians recognize the role of schemata in first-order number theory where Peano’s second-order Induction Axiom is approximated by Herbrand’s (...) Induction-Axiom Schema [23]. Similarly, in first-order set theory, Zermelo’s second-order Separation Axiom is approximated by Fraenkel’s first-order Separation Schema [17]. In some of several closely related senses, a schema is a complex system having multiple components one of which is a template-text or scheme-template, a syntactic string composed of one or more “blanks” and also possibly significant words and/or symbols. In accordance with a side condition the template-text of a schema is used as a “template” to specify a multitude, often infinite, of linguistic expressions such as phrases, sentences, or argument-texts, called instances of the schema. The side condition is a second component. The collection of instances may but need not be regarded as a third component. The instances are almost always considered to come from a previously identified language (whether formal or natural), which is often considered to be another component. This article reviews the often-conflicting uses of the expressions ‘schema’ and ‘scheme’ in the literature of logic. It discusses the different definitions presupposed by those uses. And it examines the ontological and epistemic presuppositions circumvented or mooted by the use of schemata, as well as the ontological and epistemic presuppositions engendered by their use. In short, this paper is an introduction to the history and philosophy of schemata. (shrink)

Being mainly concerned with the origins and development of formal logic, current “histories of logic” often devote scarce, if any, space to logic in the early modern period. In standard narratives, emphasis is put, on one side, on Aristotle’s Organon and on the Stoics’ logic of propositions, and on the other side, on the development of mathematical logic from Boole and Frege on. The picture often emerging from such reconstructions represents early modern philosophers—net of their criticisms of Aristotelian syllogism— as (...) largely estranged from the discipline. It is true that, the medieval period’s concern with semantic and inference issues has been accounted... (shrink)