We began by discussing Zeno as a reactionary. He saw that Epicureanism was sweeping Greece and sought to reverse this trend, because he saw Epicureanism as a false philosophy. Zeno harbored a special hatred for atomism, and hedonism (pleasure as the good), two Epicurean staples.
We then learned that the word for Epicurus’ school, “Stoa”, means “porch” in Greek. This name was used because, being a foreigner, Zeno was not permitted to own his own space, and thus he and his followers met on a porch.
There were three main periods of Stoic thought: ancient, middle, and Roman/new Stoa.
On a side note, Dr. Layne mentioned that not-being has an ontological status of being to the Stoics, which is a crucial point, for it will have many implications in metaphysics.
Again expressing the dialogue between Epicureanism and Stoicism, Dr. Layne showed us a chart which depicted the almost diametrical nature of their belief systems. Glancing over: where the Stoics believed in monism, the Epicureans believed in atomism; where the Stoics defended an absolute teleology, the Epicureans disregarded any notion of an ultimate end or goal; where the Stoics were Pantheistic (their Gods played an integral role in the composition and nature of our world), the Epicureans believed in absentee gods; to the Stoics the soul was distinct from the body, but to the Epicureans, the soul was embodied (made of tiny, round atoms); where the Stoics held a strict, deontological ethic, the Epicureans believed that pleasure was the good.
The metaphor of the orchard illustrated the tripartition of philosophy from the Stoics’ perspective. The walls or outer parameter of an orchard is logic: it delimits and defends the orchard. The necessary conditions of the orchard, like sunshine, and water, and everything necessary for the trees to grow, represents physics. And finally, the fruit of all our labor is Ethics.
Logos meant many things to the Stoics. It was the source of truth in logic, the constructive principle in physics, and the normative principle in ethics. Long describes logos as having two parts: 1) dialectic, and 2) rhetoric. By all accounts, logos acts as a fountainhead of understanding. Rejecting the Parmenidian and Platonic sense of nous, the Stoics subscribed to a Heraclitean logos in order to argue for the objective and subjective man. This point became very unclear to me as it was then connected to episteme (mind), and ousia (being). It seemed to boil down to logos being “in us”.
The Stoics placed a heavy emphasis on language, and saw logos as the principle of truth, i.e., the law of thinking, knowing, and speaking (again, dialectic and rhetoric). Since logic is the elaboration of the criteria for truth, it needed to be treated first, so that it could act as the hand-servant of the Stoics’ other investigations (especially ethics).
The Stoic reliance on the senses, or their epistemological optimism, led them to engage in a dispute with the skeptics. For the Stoics, man is born “Tabula Rasa” or “blank slate”. We have no intuitive knowledge. Experience is the source of everything we know, meaning that sensation holds an important position to the stoics, for all knowledge depends upon it.
Foreshadowing Descartes’ “clear and distinct” ideas, the Stoics argued that only cataleptic sensations were infallible. These referred to any comprehensive presentation of reality. The term verdical presentation was brought up, meaning a sensation to which we assent—logos in our soul. This is important to the stoics, because they believed that we were not free as to whether or not we experience a certain sensation, but we were free to affirm/assent to or deny said sensation.
This “liberty of assent” should adhere to certain rules put forward by the stoics. These rules took the form of Stoic logic, or dialectic, which provides guidelines for inference.
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