On 2/28/11, we continued our discussion on Stoicism. We reiterated the importance of logos, or reason, within Stoic philosophy, which ultimately leaves us with a loss of the second sailing, a loss of the super-sensible. Everything, for the Stoics, is in everything. There is a unity within the world, which logos, is used to defend. Reason is able to defend certain principles through the use of the criterion for truth. We also discussed the importance of empirical evidence, but we made the distinction in saying that sensation is NOT a criteria for truth.
To begin class, we talked about sensation to presentation to concept. What makes for a good assent to knowledge is a cataleptic presentation, but there is also a non-cataleptic presentation. Whereas a cataleptic presentation deals directly with a real object, non-cataleptic presentation does not precede from any real object and/or fails to agree with other judgements of an object. To clarify what a 'presentation' is exactly, we talked about a presentation as something that the intellect does. Every thing, every experience, is conceived by the intellect in different ways. This can be done immediately or indirectly, through inference. In experiencing something, such as coffee, we have an immediate and direct relationship between our sensation and our intellect. Upon drinking coffee, we can come up with the concept of sweet. These concepts are immediate in the sense that we do not need to taste sweet twice in order to possess the concept of sweet.
Indirectly, however, our intellect works in three ways. In resemblance, our intellect can take the image of a singular man or woman and move to the concept of humankind in general. We may not have direct sensory experience of man or woman, but we can still have the concept of humankind. In composition, our intellect can put two immediate experiences together in order to form a new concept. For example, Dr. Layne said that we may have the experience of a fish and a different experience of a woman, but we can conjoin both fish and woman to conceive of a mermaid. Lastly, we talked about analogy, through which our intellect adds or subtracts something from a concept in order to create an entirely different concept. If you add height and weight to a human, for instance, one is able to conceive of a giant. We also talked about the concept of tabula rossa-that we, as humans, are born with a blank slate. We do not, therefore, have any innate concepts within us, they are merely imprinted on us at an early age.
Furthermore, we discussed language and thought within Stoic philosophy. Although we can conceive of universals, such as manhood, that does not mean that these universals are corporeal. Our language, although it refers to real things, is not corporeal in itself. Thus, the meaning of my sentence is not real, but the references that I make are very real. In order to be real, a body must be able to be act and to be acted upon. Being is always and solely corporeal. Thus, the meaning of our language is not real
To continue, we moved from logic to physics. Dr. Layne stated that the Stoic physics is through and through materialistic and corporeal. Being is body, so the soul, God, good, and wisdom are also body. Virtue is a body because it makes us act. Sadness, for example, calls me to act-I cry when I am sad. We can easily see the roots of medieval philosophy within Stoic physics in talking about matter and form. Body is, for the stoics, both matter and form. Form, for the stoics, is the active principle of nature, whereas matter is the passive principle. Although we can logically distinguish form from matter, one can not exist in the world without the other. These two principles of matter and form are the basis for the Stoic physics as a pantheistic monism. We talked about how, because form is in everything, God is in everything and is everything. As previously mentioned, God is corporeal, and God's being as corporeal explains how everything is in everything-rendering a complete and total mingling of bodies.
To conclude, we continued to talk about God and nature. Phusis, or nature, implies both matter and the intrinsic agent of form which gives purpose and telos to all things. Here, we are able to see a complete rejection of Epicureanism. The stoics believe in a complete teleology, that all beings are innately moving towards their goal or purpose. God, who is phusis, is also logos, thus he is our principle of intelligence, and his pneuma, or spirit, extends through the universe with different intensities. I'm not entirely sure what that means, because this is where our class ended, so… hopefully we will learn more on Wednesday.
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