 Okay, so let's get into Stoic logic and physics before we get into the ideas just a brief Timeline about the scale of Stoicism and the developments that happen within stoicism. So, you know It starts before 300 BC the founding of the school by Zeno of Kyrtium, but then it develops over the next 500 years or so and in the last couple of weeks of the class we're going to be focused on writings by a Roman Stoic named Seneca and several of you wrote scholar assignments about a book I think by Pierre Hadoe on the inner citadel about Marcus Aurelius a very late stoic. So most of the ideas that we read about in for today on stoic logic and physics was describing Greek stoic theories so closer to this end and We think of stoicism as being one Systematic philosophy that there's some there's some way to say, you know What every true statement within the system is and so forth and what all it's committed to But in fact there are developments of course in the school over time different interests Responding to different needs different crises different kinds of students different languages writing in Latin causes a lot of Problems for translating, you know Greek had been developing a sophisticated scientific language over 500 or a thousand years earlier Writers in Latin had none of that nothing of it and had to take it all over from the Greeks. And so this is a big period of transition and translation and information in a way of stoicism into these later Schools, so we have to we have to keep in mind the development and there used to be a tendency to talk about early Stoicism and in sort of middle stoicism with postodonias and then you know late Stoicism with these Roman figures like the Seneca and Marcus Aurelius That way of talking and that periodization has fallen out of favor because it isn't really Possible to draw very bright lines here and these weren't categories that the actors themselves used They thought they were just doing stoicism Not late stoicism or something like that And so there is a sense again in which it's a unified philosophy in fact so unified that though they Recognize the traditional tripartite division of philosophy into logic physics and ethics They develop these various kind of analogies to the way that these parts are Interactive interdependent and cohesive so they compare philosophy to an organism whose bones and sinews are logic whose soul is physics and whose flesh and Muscle is ethics Now I'm not sure what exactly all that means or how that's supposed to be interpreted or interpreted or understood Actually, it's not Michael since you are working on the idea of Systematicity in philosophy it occurred to me that it might be a good idea for you to look into what exactly the Stoics are doing with these images of highly Unified philosophy whatever it means and whatever the significance of these different parts Related to these different parts The idea is that there's an organic unity of it that the organism as it were can't exist or subsist Without all of the parts Interacting well together, and so they also have an even more bizarre image of an egg which is a sort of proto Organistic Analogy where logic is the shell Physics is the yoke and ethics is the white part surrounding The yoke and one would have to get into and figure out what their views about embryology and so forth were as a matter of biology and physics I think in order to unpack that Analogy and then a bit more homely of a comparison to a garden where logic is the walls You have around the garden physics or the fields or the flower beds And then ethics is the fruit or produce that comes out of this Now again, not sure what these images are supposed to convey But the only point I need to make with them now is them stressing the tight unity and interdependence of all of these Parts of velocity and also the fact that they can be Distinguished into parts we could we really can analyze an egg into those three different parts But at the same time it's all part of one entity one being Now one thing interesting about Stoics and this has to do with the development of the school over a long period of time is that Stoics had different conceptions about the order in which the parts of philosophy should be taught So some of the early people the founder Zeno and chrysopis the most important developer of stoicism as a systematic scientific Philosophy chrysopis thought that the proper order was to study logic first then physics then ethics Perhaps the idea being if you can't reason because you haven't studied logic How are you going to reason about physics or ethics? And so we need to get certain Preliminaries about reasoning out of the way before we can move on to these other subjects, but Diogenes of tolmaeus had a pretty good Argument and saying look look we got to do ethics first because we can't even let these people out on the street until we give them some Ethics right you don't even want to know if you should teach them this this other stuff about Logic don't teach somebody nuclear physics until you know that they're a good person right so you need to do ethics first But Apollodorus and then clean these gives a more detailed version of this Says that the order's logic ethics and then physics after all again. We need people to be able to Reason and we need them to be ethical people But then eventually they need to learn the physics that is basic to all this and the clean these Arrangement is just an expansion of that topic study Dialectic first and then rhetoric those are both kinds of logic then study ethics and politics which are both Parts of ethics and then study physics and theology which are parts of physics now the Sort of middle period stoic named postodonius Propose the order physics logic and ethics and this is a standard way of teaching the System of stoicism and it's the one that all follow today because most of our sources follow that order. Yeah question is a teaching order supposed to insinuate the Physics say for Xena that physics is dependent on logic and then ethics Depends on physics or is it just simply maybe easier to teach in this order? well, I interpret these as literally being a pedagogical order in which a student comes to grasp the system and not Not anything about its Importance because if we ask about its importance, that's like asking Whether the tree or the fruit is important or whether bones or muscles are important They're all important and the organism doesn't function without it. So this isn't This isn't an idea that Xena and Chrysippus didn't think much of ethics In fact, if you wanted to you can think of it as everything's preliminary leading up to the real thing, which is ethics Despite the way I was characterizing. Oh, no, we've got to teach them this First it could be that it's that it's building up to the to the real point of it Okay, so this isn't about the importance This is trying to work out a theory of what order do we teach people things in something We're still concerned about now into every sub field So we have curricular theories which are reflected in the order of course Requirements that you have to take in a field. So we have very early logic requirements in the philosophy department Yeah, this is what this is why Rick brushes the day is consumed with teaching Phil 10 because we have a sort of Chrysippin Concept to this and we don't we don't we don't give you access to David Brink until the very end We're doing ethics or something No, not really, but there there is a question about this. Which order does it make sense to teach it in? So I'm gonna I'm gonna do it in the the Poseidonian Order, so let's talk about stoic physics first now Way the way I'll introduce this is just giving you the way That they set up divisions of the field of ethics into different topics This isn't really giving you content of their physics is showing you how they divide the topic of physics now What is what does physics mean again? My favorite question to stunt people with means nature Okay, so this is how we divide the study of nature Okay First division is the cosmos Okay, the world the universe Okay, and this essentially has two parts mathematical astronomy on the one hand, which is an extremely Precise accurate discipline even by this point. In fact, they develop analog computers and so forth at this point So I'll show you on another slide Another part of it is natural history just the Reasoning about what the size shape composition origin Whether it's living or not whether it's destructible or not whether it's governed by God and providence and so forth or not the sort of Description qualitative description of the nature of the cosmos as opposed to the quantitative description of it in the Previous category which by mathematical astronomy. We also probably mean to include meteorology so accounting for things like rainbows And earthquakes clouds winds rains, etc Even though those that we don't usually put those in for astronomy astro meteorology Now another aspect of physics is the theory of causal Explanation what things cause if you want to know anything about physics you need to begin to concentrate on the problem of what things cause other things and again, we have a sort of mathematical and qualitative division mathematical causal explanations we develop theories for in optics harmonics mechanics fields like that and Then we also have a theory of the psychology of explanation So what satisfies us as an explanation of a given phenomenon? What kind of causes and things do we think we need to grasp or apprehend in order to say that we know or understand something and then the third division into the principles and elements and there are two essentially principles of Stoic physics the first is an active principle which is identical with God and a bunch of other stuff is all explained in a moment and a passive principle which is essentially identified with matter and so the basic pictures that what really exists out there is a vast amount of otherwise unstructured unqualified matter and then a kind of God-like mind or reason that imposes order and form on that Unqualified matter and when we look out at the cosmos. That's what we're seeing is a rationally organized continuum of matter that includes different kinds of beings that we can Distinguish for example inanimate beings plants humans also The heavenly objects like sun moon stars planets how all of those move and so forth all of that seems to bear out the idea that There is some active rational principle which is ordering Lifeless inert passive matter Now here's another way to divide stoic physics or rather in order in which to teach it begin with the relatively straightforward idea of bodies Things that are generated and destroyed that we're familiar with on all sorts of levels This includes furniture computers people animals plants and so forth in fact everything is a body According to the system. So in a way, we think of stoicism is actually being kind of materialist system like Epicureans because They think that only bodies are real Except there are some non bodily things that are real in virtue of their relationship to bodies and this includes time place void and What I'm translating is language, but is actually Would be more literally translated as sayable things or lepta, which I will get to when we get to Discuss stoic logic Okay, then again, we could teach about the principles unlike bodies principles are Ungenerated and indestructible and these are of two kinds the passive kind unqualified Substance pure material body and on the other hand an active principle reason Fundamentally reason or in Greek logos, but this is equivalent to Cosmos God reason mind fate even Zeus So the active principle that organizes all this passive inert material stuff It is rationally organized and you can think of it If you want is being rationally organized by Zeus or if you don't like the name Zeus You can call it God or whatever your preferred term is call it the mind or You could even call it fate But all of those are identical equivalent notions and and they constitute the active principle Then they proceed to a discussion of the elements earth, air water and fire which are bodies that Out of which the other kinds of bodies like plants animals and humans are made out of and into which they Resolve or are dissolved upon death then there is a more intense discussion of God how as Identical to reason God actively organized the cosmos in the best possible way. Is it like a designer or craftsman? How what kinds of if so what kinds of tools and what kinds of materials are used and what kinds of blueprints and plans and So on yeah Between God Whoops no not really this is this is just an order in which you would you would comprehend these various Topics okay, so it's not It's not that there is there is another God a kind of anthropomorphic God And That's the only That's the only truly sort of divine Entity here is reasoning itself and the fact that this matter is organized in some rational way meaning First of all that it's rath rationally Comprehensible I can Figure out how this thing is composed out of earth air water and fire But second of all that it's there for a reason and that and we can give reasons for the existence Update of these things like that. We need to set elevated objects upon this thing That's why this is here But we can also apply that why this is here to everything else in the cosmos and then and then what we're doing is sort of Looking at the mind or the reasoning of this God who has organized everything in this way So so a lot of this stuff is is repeating, you know elements are related to bodies and so forth but this is a sort of syllabus of Topics that you learn in order to comprehend their physics you go into greater Detail and you also get to more and more Complex entities so after a more intensive discussion of God than you have a rather esoteric discussion of this idea of limits and then of place void Time and these entities that exist relative to bodies that aren't themselves bodies And so they don't exist in the strict sense now there was another question if there wasn't a follow-up There's Do your bodies like would God be considered body in that sense? Well, no God is the active principle to organizing all of those bodies Okay, but yes Yes, so it wasn't just set up and then like clockwork and push a button and now it's all going It's actually actively still being ordered and organized by a rational mind okay, and When I get on to discussing their theory of cosmic cycles will look at some problems with that idea that there's a sort of Continual rational governance of the cosmos. Yeah Well The elements essentially play this role So they are they are sort of we can't we can't keep dividing the elements up into into Prime matter or something there's a theory about how the elements can be transformed into each other and so there's a kind of transmutation of elements and then there's a They recombination of elements in ways that give rise to more and more complex structures that create Greater complexity of bodies, but at one end of the scale is the simplicity of the elements at the other end is the complexity of something like An ape or a human being or the space shuttle or something like that That's very complex arrangement of different material parts Go ahead I don't have Well that that is where they get into That is exactly where they get into the discussion of limits place void Time and motion how these bodies move these bodies have natural ways of moving due to different qualities they have like heaviness lightness dryness wetness things like that and So the elemental bodies have natural kinds of movements But then different orders of complexity of organization introduce new Principles about how they move and generally in accordance with with ends and so forth that they have and Purposes that they play in this grand overarching cosmic scheme. So the ultimate account of motion Is going to begin by specifying a reason why the thing is moving that way, okay? Unlike unlike say an Epicurean view where we explain motion by just saying material bodies have this inherent tendency to Drop to fall downwards and then they must swerve every once in a while But they also move as a result of their collisions and we focus on on the actual material interactions of the body Of these bodies and sort of try to build things from the ground up out of them The stoic tendency is to explain the thing by looking at the ends and the purposes that it serves and then looking at how The matter has been organized in such a way to make those ends possible. So A human being is a very complex Entity and it has the and it's a body like everything else but it has a body of a certain shape like Standing upright and having hands and having eyes and so forth in order to bring about certain ends ultimately happiness, but also reasoning rationality emotional control things like that Yeah Yeah, which book Okay That's a nice notion we have a PhD student working on spinoza So I'm happy to hear about that and the There are actually two senses of nature a specific use of the term nature and then a general use of the term nature and In the most general sense it is identified nature is identified with reason the cosmos God fate Zeus Etc. But There is a specific sense that I will get to in a moment in which In in which nature really describes the kind of growth reproduction use of nutrition that applies to a plant and that plant like things have natures and animals are plant like things in a certain respect and so are Humans and by virtue that fact they have natures, but they also have levels of cosmic organization that go beyond Just natural organization Okay, but the idea about living in accordance with nature Which is the absolute key ethical principle of the system that next next time we meet on Wednesday We'll really be trying to unpack what they mean by living in accordance with nature now living in accordance with nature in Greek would be living in accordance with physics. So having a comprehension of The physical world the natural world how it's ordered and why it's organized this way and then living in accordance with it Okay, so that's certainly one meaning is grasping what actually is going on like that The earth isn't flat and that there is global warming and things like that and then Acting in accordance with those facts about what's happening in nature Okay, so a little bit more about the cosmos again And you'll start to be annoyed by this and then that'll then you'll really be grasping stoicism how they make these Identity statements the cosmos one sense of it just is God or Zeus Another sense of the term cosmos is the organized system of stars sun moon planets earth, etc That's the way we usually think of the term being used But then another sense is the combination of one and two Which they describe as a complex of gods and humans and things that come to be for their sake and so Notice that in that description of the cosmos and that should say human not men That's my Typographical mistake somebody in here is working on Stoics on gender and sexuality. Who is that? Okay, so as you know, they would be talking about humans there not men Cosmos is a complex of gods and humans and things that come to be for their sake i.e. everything else Okay, all other plants animals inanimate bodies and so on so Contained in that definition of cosmos is a statement of what we call anthropocentrism that is making human beings the center of the cosmos and in a way they literally are in their cosmographic diagram but Center of value in the cosmos so another way to put it would be the end of everything Everything else exists for the sake of human beings. That's the thesis of anthropocentrism and the stoics are anthropocentric So they think that plants animals these other things all exist for our sake Now to my mind it's a preposterous notion, but on the other hand everybody acts as if it's true Right, our entire society is set up as if everything in the cosmos exists for our sake Use it however we want we don't even really have many Standards about how we use animals. We just use them for our own sake and The stoics would say that's exactly how the whole cosmos is set up to be like that So our practices justified if stoicism is true Now just about their Cosmographic diagram you've got a spherical Geocentric plenum that means earth is at the center of the solar system the sun and the moon and the other planets and the thick stars Go around the earth Everything in this planet is full. So there is no Interstitial void. There's no void within the plenum. It's completely plenum means a full thing. It's full of bodies in In the most elementary things full of earth, air, water and fire, but then these are arranged into into complex entities and so there's no void within this System, but there is an infinite void in all directions outside of it an Extramundial void Okay, so unlike the abracurians who say that void exists interspersed With atoms and there's a continuous alteration throughout the Infinite cosmos in all directions of bodies and void for the stoics There's a limited set of bodies in a spherical cosmos situated within an infinite void in all directions Now there's been a really fascinating discovery and development of a second century BC analog Computer that's composed out of 30 gears and it was found on a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikithra in 1901 and throughout the 20th century Scholars and engineers and scientists worked to reconstruct this thing figure out what its purposes were and actually build models of it It still worked and they figured out that it's capable of computing the astronomical positions of the Sun Moon stars eclipses and coordinating these with the Cycles of Olympic games and you could do it decades in advance and you could run the mechanism forward or backwards This is the oldest analog computer that we know about And the leading theory about who developed it right now is that it was designed by a stoic scientist somebody probably influenced by posedonius and this is because we have Reports of Cicero describing visiting posedonius's school in Rhodes and describing seeing these Planetary spherical objects that do these kind of calculations and also Other evidence and other artifacts on the shipwreck come from the island of Rhodes Even though it's at the other end of the Mediterranean from So that's an interesting thing and it's built on principles of the stoic system and it's built on Rational mathematical Principles so they came up with a model a craftsman-like model of how you could replicate the Motions of these heavenly bodies and it sort of justifies their theory that it is rationally organized because it's rationally organized if you can Give a reason why it's all ordered in a certain way and you can actually it's the kind of thing that a craftsman could know and explain to Others and so they they built this you know not so they could like send email and do Instagram and that sort of thing But so that they could have a model of a rational cosmos I Think they are our internet is a model of an irrational Like out of control anti stoic cosmos Okay, now this gets back to the question about The question about nature which I'll move through rather quickly because we haven't said anything about stoic logic yet but again the cosmos is sort of administered by this mind God or reason and This pervades it completely, but it pervades some Things in the cosmos more so than others and so it pervades inanimate things like crystals and minerals and metals and that sort of thing in The sense that those bodies hold together and have the qualities they do by virtue of what the stoics called their hexes Plants exhibit a different order of Complexity of being they not only have a hexes, but also their growth use of nutrition ability to reproduce Gives them what the stoics call a nature or a physics? Animals show even greater complexity. They also have a nature like plants do and a hexes like inanimate things do but they're capable of Sensation and moving themselves around in space which plants aren't able to do and so we say that they have a psyche or a soul And then finally we say that humans also have a psyche or a soul as Animals do in a sense. We are animals and of course we have a nature just like Plants do and we have a hexes like these other inanimate objects do but we also have this Rational leading controlling part of our mind, which is able to use language in which they call the hegemon Now I've already I think said enough about God Bodies nature and so forth and we can you can go back and review the slides If you want some more details on those say a little bit about their view about fate because it's very controversial Everything happens by fate according to them fate just means What is caused and everything is caused nothing doesn't have a cause So since everything has a cause and the fate is just the conjunction of all causes Everything is faded and so they actually hold that prophecy and divination or if you want a contemporary term prediction And so forth is real Since providence exists in sense causes are definite and we can break everything down and figure out what its causes are and then we can Realize that if those causes are going to be in place again. We'll end up having the same effects They also hold that every well-formed proposition whether it's about the past future or Present is either true or false and they exclude any Middle option or exclude the possibility of a contradiction being true So what will happen in the future is already true just as and it's just as fixed and certain is what happened in the past Also, the cosmos has a definite rational plan and purpose And so we can't be introducing uncaused events into that or also would be introducing Unreason and irrationality into it So the Stoics embrace a notion of fate and what's challenging is that in their ethics, which we'll get to on Wednesday and later this week They also put a huge premium on the idea of freedom and free human action So how can they have an idea about free ethical human action? Well at the same time holding that everything is faded. That is an enormous problem for the Stoics Yeah, I think here doesn't mean determinism doesn't mean that something yeah, it does yes, it does. Why do you say it doesn't? Rational causes or deterministic causes So because There's a rational cause for that man But it doesn't mean when so sense doesn't mean when What doesn't mean when What doesn't mean when Let's say something else so faith in my opinion. I thought means something which has been already pre-planned Doesn't mean like well. Yes, the the entire cosmos has been pre-planned by a rational mind It all has been pre-planned and and and future plans and And so that I mean that that's totally their view So in that case it means determinism yes Determinism fully deterministic system So their account of human freedom must be something that says human freedom is somehow compatible with determinism and So they are compatible this They hold that freedom is compatible with determinism in Order to see how that is we're gonna have to learn something about their ethics But as far as physics is concerned, this is their view and it seems like a pretty good view Which part of it you want to disagree with right that some things don't have causes that some propositions Can be both true and false or neither true and false none of those are real good options for logic or physics Okay, so It's it's a difficult controversial Notion, but in order to see how they how they cope with the ethical part of it We need to know something about their ethics. Yeah Is there a Is there a hypothesized end for the cosmos and everything is pre-planned into the future Well, and is ambiguous here between and some ends or purposes Okay, like I have an end of getting lunch after this So that means I'm going to go over to the cafeteria or whatever and end also means the last in a temporal Sequence so they think there is an end of the cosmos in both senses Okay, so the cosmos periodically is Consumed in a conflagration and completely destroyed and returned to a state of primeval or elemental matter at which time it is then rationally reorganized by this God fate mind which brings the the cosmos into Being again now which cosmos does it bring into being well this one because it always brings a rational cosmos into being and We're in a cosmos right now and it's rationally organized So this is the one that it brings about and so they have a doctrine of eternal return Depending on the kind of person you are you'll either find this very reassuring or extremely existentially Disappointing but in their view the entire cosmos Will undergo these cycles of death and rebirth like internally So we will eventually all be sitting here talking about stellar physics with this slide on the board and everybody sitting in exactly these places and Holding their pens are not holding their pens and having even or odd numbers of pairs on their head and so forth All of that will be exactly the same and it will happen not only Again, but an infinite number of times in the future exactly like this Okay Yeah, so so he does think that like every every cycle will be exactly like the previous cycle Like how in a second says can the world cycles be differentiated? Yes? right, so if they are all Literally identical as I just said in every respect and so whether you have an even or odd number of pairs on your head Whether that will be exactly the same the next cycle if every detail like that was exactly the same Then there might be a problem with saying that these cycles are different in what sense are they different then? They're identical and so there's only one cycle Okay, but so Christi this is way of dealing with this is saying actually there will be minor differences So the but they won't make any difference to the rational ordering So you may actually now you have an even number of pairs in your head and the next one you'll have an odd Number okay, but that doesn't make there is no causal influence of that to to any any other thing Or and make sure you notice this when you get up in this world You might start on your left foot when you get out of the desk But in the next one you might start on the right foot, okay, but there's no other there's no other difference that has any It makes any difference Okay, so but then there's lots of paradoxes about this and one can do do an entire research paper on their notion of eternal return and the Religration and so on so I've only got five minutes left So I'm gonna blow through logic fairly quickly and I'm going to really here's here's the divisions of the stoic logic And I'm gonna focus on this last part their idea of a graspable presentation So What they hold is that we get these Presentations they're not just raw sensory data from the world, but notice so you're not just seeing colors and shapes out here You're actually seeing Colors and shapes Organized into people and tables and chairs and so forth and so there's something more than just bare perception going on a sensation going on There's a kind of perception That you're taking in and this is very complex phenomenon this idea of what we're actually Perceiving or what is presented to our sense organs and they hold that among the things presented to our sense organs Some of these are what they call graspable that is we can learn the nature of reality from them and They have a kind of theory about how we acquire Knowledge we start with a blank slate like a newborn human this human has various sensations and Memories and starts getting more and more Articulate perception instead of just sensation of the world and then a plurality of these presentations are remembered for their Similarities in kind and that generates a kind of experience with phenomenon and then we get out of these Experiences we eventually formulate Conceptions about things And we can also gain Conceptions by other people who have had more experience who teach them to us Now a presentation is just basically an alteration of the soul like some kind of change in the brain or the heart whatever wherever the center of Cognition is wherever the leading part of the soul the hegemon is and The senses are joined to the outside world by these presentations, so they fall into our sense organs and Generally their view is that the presentations are Reliable and there are among them ones that are clear and distinct and these are the ones that are Graspable and on the basis of which we can actually produce knowledge these are the ones The ones that are graspable to which we ascent with our minds ascent is A power that we have and it's totally voluntary We give a scent of presentations. We say yes This is really what's happening or we say no that really isn't what's happening like if we're viewing an object It's very far away a tower and it looks like it's circular But we know that it's square then we can actually make a kind of we can not Consent to the appearance that the Sun is only a foot in diameter or that that tower is actually Circular and that's because we know on the basis of other Perceptions like being close up to things or seeing how Objects appear smaller that are farther away. We can sort of correct these things And There's the ground Presentations are necessary in order to produce knowledge of things But we can get by in life with less than knowledge often with just a kind of Opinion that arises out of having reliable Presentations now it's interesting because like the Stoics. They're also empiricists so all knowledge has a basis in sensation and Perception and they are like the Epicureans very Optimistic about how reliable these presentations and perceptions are And this thus they like the Epicureans are very vulnerable to skeptical attacks on how sensibles and perception works