Within Reason - #141 Stoicism: Everything You Need to (Actually) Know - John Sellars

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).Come to my tour in February: https://www.livenation.co.uk/alex-o-connor-tickets-adp1641612.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com. - VIDEO NOTESJohn Sellars is a Reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, a visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Member of Wolfson College, Oxford. His books include Lessons in Stoicism, The Fourfold Remedy, Aristotle and his work has been translated into over a dozen languages.TIMESTAMPS00:00 – Tour00:32 – Did Socrates Found Stoicism?08:03 – The Three Eras of Stoicism17:50 – Stoic Logic26:19 – Empiricism: How the Stoics Got Knowledge34:33 – Materialism: Only Physical Things Exist43:00 – How Reason Fundamentally Animates the Universe48:43 – Did the Stoics Believe in God?59:37 – Do the Stoics Contradict Themselves?01:08:17 – Stoic Ethics01:24:24 – How Did the Stoics Deal With Evil?01:36:32 – Can You Choose Your Outcome If Everything Is Determined?

Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the 21st century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you. I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be an extensive Q&A, and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your philosophical hot takes. The tour dates are on screen. The link to buy tickets is in the description, and I hope to see you there. John Sellers, welcome to the show. Thank you for inviting me.

Was Socrates the real founder of Stoicism? That's a really good question. I think in many ways he was, or perhaps it would be better to say, he was the kind of grandfather figure for Stoic ethics in particular. And obviously, there are other bits of Stoicism that I'm sure we'll talk about. I did it later as well. So physics and logic. But for ethics, I think, yes, that's a good way of putting it. So he's the first Greek philosopher to put on the table the idea that it's a virtuous character and only a virtuous character that's key to living a good life. And that's the kind of famous Socratic idea that the Stoics then take up. But typically if you ask somebody who was the founder of Stoicism, they'll tell you it's this chap, Zeno, right? Yeah, that's right. Zeno of Sitium. He was not the same Zeno. famed for paradoxes. That's correct. So there's Zeno of Elia, who's the paradox guy, who was a pupil of Permanides. They were in southern Italy, so that's much earlier. Zeno of Scythium, so Scythium's in

Cyprus. He comes from Cyprus. He comes to Athens. There's a great story that we have, which may or may not be true, which is that he was sent to Athens on a business trip by his father and with a ship full of cargo and as he approached the harbour near Athens there was a shipwreck and he lost everything and he kind of managed to survive the shipwreck drag himself up onto the beach

or by the Piraeus port made his way as he sorted himself out after the shipwreck he kind of found a bookstall and started reading in the bookstall and one of the books he picked up was Xenophon's memorabilia of Socrates So literally the story we have is that his first encounter with philosophy was reading about Socrates. And he then, again, this is all probably apocryphal, but he says to the bookseller,

wow, this Socrates guy sounds amazing. Where can I find people like him? And at that moment, another philosopher walks past a guy called Cretes, who was a cynic. And the bookseller says to him, follow that man. He'll teach you what you want to know. So that's the kind of origin story. Yeah. And Zeno is the guy who then gets credited with Theritexel.

founding what comes to be known as stoicism. And we'll get into what stoicism actually is. But it's interesting you say there that he begins by following a cynic. The cynics are another sort of school, if you like, of philosophers from the same time period. And we're talking like ancient Greece here. Where, I mean, the most famous example of a cynic is Diogenes. And these people would famously sort of throw social custom to the wind. You know, Diogenes is said to have lived in a barrel and to just sort of urinate in the street and, you know, to when Alexander the Great comes to him and says, is there anything I can do for you? He says, get out of my son, like, you know. And so this story sort of begins with this recognition that a lot of the stuff in the world kind of isn't really, like, relevant or meaningful,

or it's kind of arbitrary in some degree. And so do you think it's fair to say that Sustin kind of grows out of cynicism, is influenced by cynicism, or is this just a sort of historical coincidence? No, there's definitely an influence and it joins the dots with us for that connection with Socrates. So famously, Plato had described Diogenes, the cynic, as Socrates gone mad. So the thought is that what Diogenes was doing when he develops this cynic philosophy is he's taking Socratic ideas and pushing them to the extreme. So Diogenes takes that idea that it's a virtuous character that you need in order to live a good life and only that. and then develops this attitude to a complete indifference

to literally everything else. So as you say, he kind of sleeps in a barrel, doesn't care. At one point, one of our anecdotes to Jesse was sold into slavery. It's like,

well, what do I care? My virtuous character is still intact. Why would that bother me? So you get this kind of extreme view in Dogenes and the subsequent cynics where virtue is the only thing

that matters to live a good life. So I'm not going to care about anything else that goes on in my life whatsoever, right? And as I say, that becomes very extreme. And part of that connected to that, as you hinted at, is the idea that traditional social customs and conventions then become irrelevant. So there's a rejection of all of those traditional conventions. And there's the idea that instead of living according to custom or law, you live according to nature.

You're just following nature's prompts. And again, that's a key cynic idea that the Stoics. will take up. I mean, in terms of what happens to Zeno, perhaps I'll sort of say a little bit more about that, just to flesh things out. So Zeno goes kind of follows Cretes for a while, learns all about the cynic philosophy,

perhaps ultimately decides that's not for him, even though it's obviously a big influence on him. He then goes off to Plato's Academy. Plato, by this point, is dead, but his followers are continuing this tradition. And we're told that he studies at Plato's Academy for 10 years, right? That's a really long time. So he learns all about platonic philosophy at Plato's Academy.

He also studies with a couple of other guys who we now refer to as Magarians, who were another group of Socratic philosophers around at the time, who had very strong interests in logic. But ultimately he decides he doesn't want to be a cynic, he doesn't want to be a Platonist, he doesn't want to be a Megarian. And so then he finally decides to set up under his own name, if you like. And that's when he starts teaching at the painted Stoa in the centre of Athens. And so that's when he kind of starts the Stoic tradition, pulling elements from all of these other people that he studied with beforehand.

Yeah, and that's where we get this name Stoicism from, the Stoer where Zeno and his followers would meet to discuss philosophy. And interestingly, you know, we're talking about this guy Zeno and we're talking about the cynics. A lot of people might think, okay, but I've heard of Stoicism. And I thought it was like, I thought it was like a Roman thing. It's like, you know, Marcus Aurelius and his meditations, that's a Roman thing, and Seneca and guys like these. But I think we can tell a story here of what stoicism is and point out that it sort of begins in Greece.

And it comes in stages. Another thing that people might know about stoicism, and I'm sort of framing this, people have asked me a lot, like, to talk about stoicism. They said, what do you think about socialism? And honestly, I've always just said, I just know nothing about it. And that's why I was so excited to learn about it and try to get some thoughts together so I could speak to you and do this as a bit of an introduction. And I think the first thing to note is that in the popular imagination today, stoicism is viewed essentially as an ethical philosophy. To be a stoic is to live in a particular way, to sort of be tolerant in the face of suffering and stuff like that.

And while that is true, the thing that people need to remember is that ideas. like that don't just spring up out of nowhere. Not only is there a historical story to tell, but also Stoicism is a broader philosophy that contains not just ethics, but also a really important tradition of logic and logical thinking, as well as physics or metaphysics, relevant to the nature of the world and God's existence and stuff like that, out of which the ethics are supposed to come. So, before diving into what Stoicism actually is, Can you give us a broad overview of the kind of, I guess, like three stages of stoicism and sort of how it developed over time? Yeah, sure.

So we start off with Zeno, as we've said, in Athens around 300 BC. That's kind of roughly when things kick off. And there's a tradition of people gathering together in Athens over a couple of centuries. So Zeno's immediate sort of follower and success was a chat called Clanthes, who's very interested. in physics in particular, or we know that he had interesting things to say about physics. And he was then followed by a chat called Chrysippus. And according to tradition, Chrysippus is the most important of all of these early Stoics. He's the guy that pulls together all the threads and really develops kind of substantial philosophical system. We're told

that he wrote 705 books and they're practically all lost. So there's a huge amount that these early Stoics and Athens produced that we just don't have anymore. And so we're just dealing with fragments and secondhand reports and trying to piece the thing together. Chrysippus was most famous in antiquity as a logician. I mean, he's arguably the second great logician in antiquity after Aristotland. And he made some really important contributions. So these early Stoics and Athens really are developing a rich, complex philosophical system. There's metaphysics, physics, epistemology, logic, theories of grammar, as well as the ethics, right? So it's really rich and broad and is comparable with what you would find in the Platonic or the Aristotelian traditions.

And that tradition continues for quite a while. Until probably the beginning of the first century BC, there's a famous moment in Athenian history where a Roman general Sulla holds Athens under siege for a couple of years. And a lot of things are destroyed. It's no longer an attractive place to hang out. A lot of the philosophers run away, right? They go elsewhere. Some go to Rhodes.

Some go to Alexandria. Some go to Rome and other places in Italy. And that's the point where kind of this living tradition of Stoic philosophers in Athens and philosophers in other schools as well, to be honest, starts to kind of die down a bit. Just a few decades after that, we have the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero write a whole series of philosophical books. And in those books, he presents stoic ideas to a Roman audience. And he's translating these ideas into Latin for the first time. And that's a kind of a key moment in the reception, the subsequent reception of Stoicism,

and its introduction to the Roman world. And Cicero's philosophical works are really important for anyone interested in Stoicism because most of those works by those earlier guys are now lost. So it's Cicero's accounts that are kind of the earliest and fullest and most complete accounts we have of early Stoic thought. So those become really important. And then after Cicero, we get this whole series of other Romans that you mentioned that become really interested in Stoic ideas like Scyro. Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, those are the big three, the famous ones.

And I mean, the traditional view is that they're far more interested in ethics or they're only interested in ethics or they're not even interested in ethical theory. They're just interested in kind of applied ethics, we might say. And so that's the kind of traditional story. I mean, I think we can complicate that. I think we can see ways in which they are, in fact, if not kind of doing interesting work in physics and metaphysics and things like that, you can at least see that they're engaging with those ideas.

And the reason why they've been so influential in shaping the subsequent image of what Stoicism looks like and the way in which people tend to think about it today is that their work survive, right? So you can go into your local bookstore and buy a copy of Marcus Reeds' Meditations or Seneca's letters and just read them. And so unsurprisingly, lots of people who aren't kind of specialist academics

think, okay, this is what Stoicism is. without necessarily digging into the more sort of scholarly literature that does the hard work of trying to reconstruct what the original early Athenian Stoics were about. And it's not a bad thing. I mean, like, most people interact with most philosophies in a relatively sort of surface level way. Like maybe, yeah, I've heard of Aristotle. He's the guy that thought virtue is important. And, you know, for most people, that's kind of enough to get by and you know, you don't care that much. But I do think that if you care about philosophy and you want to know what stoicism is and you say,

well, I think stoicism is like this practical way of living or this way of responding to suffering in the world or, you know, material conditions or something, to say that that is what stoicism is, from what I've read, seems a bit like saying, like, if you ask somebody, what is Christianity? And they said, oh, it's where you don't have sex before marriage.

and you know you treat people as your brother it's like that's true Christians do do that but the whole sort of you know Jesus's resurrection and God's existence is like really important and that sort of ethical consequence is just one part of a much broader story so similarly with soicism I don't think it should be called an ethical philosophy because there's so much more going on so the question is what else is going on and maybe we should start by sort of delineating the different areas that Stoics were particularly interested. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I agree 100% with what you just said,

and just to kind of add a quick footnote to that. So I think, again, there's a very sort of traditional view, which might say, okay, these early Athenian guys, they were the theoreticians that developed this complex system, and it's all very tight and it's all very complex and similar to what you might think about Aristotle's philosophy. And then you've got these later Roman guys are just interested in practical ethics.

And if you're a serious academic philosopher, they're far less interesting. I mean, one of the things I would want to do is kind of challenge both of those stereotypes. So I would want to say that there's much more continuity across the tradition. So on the one hand, those earlier Athenian Stoics, they are doing all this complex theory,

but they're also interested in trying to find out how to live a good life and to live it themselves. And they're drawing on those real, sort of, that existential motivational, that they've inherited from Socrates and the cynics. And then our later Roman guys, I mean, the texts we have are talking about all these ethical ideas. But they're reading the works of those early Athenia Stoics. And they're familiar with all those more complex theoretical ideas and they're trying to put them into practice.

So I think really it's the contingency of textual transmission that has given us this really skewed view. So, yeah. Well, that's important, right? And it's worth also noting that, like with so many ancient texts, if the text is lost, the way that we can sort of ascertain what was in them is sometimes we're lucky enough to find fragments, and that occurs. But one of the most common places that we find quotations from text that we've lost are in people who are responding to them and criticizing them. So we have kind of access to what they said, but through the eyes or through the writing of their opponents. It's a bit like if the only knowledge of the Bible that you had was quotes from the God delusion by Richard Dawkins. You could probably piece together some of what the Bible was about, but you probably wouldn't get the most sort of Christian picture of what it was.

And I think we need to beware of that when we're talking about the earlier Stoics that there's a lot of uncertainty, but we can get a broad picture of the stuff that they cared about and the worldview that they attested to. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, this year is just a moment. flying by and I've been really busy and I'm the kind of person who will get like halfway through the day and then realize that I've forgotten to eat, but also that I'm so deep in my work that I don't want to stop and go and cook or buy something. In those moments, which have been happening quite frequently as of late, I've been using today's sponsor Huell to solve the problem. That's H-U-E-L. This is the Black Edition. And believe it or not, this bottle is a complete meal.

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Rather than sort of jumping in with this ethical stuff, it's almost like you could just shelf that and forget it for a moment and start with the foundation of philosophy, which is logic, how arguments are constructed, how words are used, how we ascertain truth. and the Stoics had their own sort of unique approach to this, right? Yes, that's right. So, as I mentioned earlier, Chrysippus is famous as a logician. He develops his own system of formal logical argument. He effectively develops, I mean, what we call now Stoic syllogistic. So, I mean, Aristotelian syllogisms are of the form. You know, all humans are.

animals, all animals are mortal, so all humans are mortal, right? All A's are B, all Bs are C. So all A's R C, right? Yeah. Cricypus was interested in different kinds of arguments. So something along the lines of, if it's raining, I'll take my umbrella, it's raining, so I'll take my umbrella. If P, then Q, P, therefore Q, right? A very different type of argument. As it happens, those, that stoic type of argumentation is the sort that was kind of resurrected much later by Frager and has much more in common with modern form or logic. So he was kind of very much ahead of his type. Yeah, like the Aristotelian logical system kind of dominated in like medieval philosophy, but the modern sort of like celebrated logic of the mathematicisation is more

and yes to the stoics. And just to be clear, because of what you just said, people might be listening and go like, they sound kind of similar. When you say, when you, when you've given Aristotelian syllogism, and a syllogism is just an argument of like premise, premise conclusion, right? Something like, you know, all A is C, therefore all B is C or whatever. You're using terms like all. Or you might say like, you know, no, A is a B. A is C, C, therefore all B's a C or whatever. You're using terms like all. Or you might say like, you know, no. dogs have three legs, Johnny has three legs, therefore Johnny is not a dog, or some or all, and you're talking about terms, so that the A and the B there in the argument, it'll be like all A's are B, all cats are animals.

So the things you're inserting are terms, like cat, animal. Whereas the stoics, the things that they're inserting with those letters are representing with those letters are not terms, but entire propositions. If P, then Q. If it is raining, then I will take my umbrella. So, in Aristotelian

The thing that we're dealing with are things like cat, dog, human. In stoic logic, we're dealing with things like, it is raining, the sky is blue, and I will get wet, that kind of stuff. Which sounds like, yeah, those things are different, but people might say, what's the important difference between thinking logically in terms of propositions versus terms, as Aristotle did? I mean, I don't think we need to see them as, being in competition with one another.

I mean, obviously they're both useful systems to have. I mean, in the Middle Ages, we have, you know, our Scydian logic dominates and there's a sense of it's, okay, this is just what logic looks like. Whereas what Chrysippus has already done, although for the most part it was largely forgotten, had said, well, actually, there are other ways of thinking about how arguments functioned. There's more to rationality than just more than some.

There are other ways we can think about consequences of certain claims. So he could see that there was more work to be done in developing logic. And that kind of propositional logic, as I've been very fruitful. Some of his logical ideas we see taken up in the Middle Ages by very famous philosopher and magician Peter Abelard. And it's not entirely clear whether he has. had access to some text that gave him some hint about what Stoic logic was all about, or whether he simply had kind of managed to develop it again himself because he was such an able legition himself. And then we see it taken up more recently by Fraga. So it's become a really

important part of the kind of logical tradition, but it has its origins with the Stoics. Yeah. And I guess you could also think of this Aristotelian logic as not just in terms of the things that are replaced by the letters, but Erystitian. Sotelian logic will have this language of all or sun or, you know, every or no, like no dogs have three legs. Whereas the language of stoic logic is more like if then. It's like conditional claims. It's like showing what sort of follows from other things in the, but putting that into like the premises, right? So it's just like two different ways of thinking about the world. But this is like the foundational starting point in philosophy, right? We've got this sort of logical system with

thinking in terms of propositions and how they follow from each other, like, okay, but, you know, the Stoics have that, but what do they build on top of the time? Let me roll back a bit. So the Stoics divide philosophy into three broad areas, logic, physics and ethics. Yeah. And we see all sorts, we hear accounts of the way in which different Stoics proposed teaching those three parts in different orders. Right. They didn't quite make up their mind if one was foundational or not. So, you know, some of them would have started teaching physics first and then logic later. So I think it would be a mistake to think that logic is the foundational bit. I think we've got this really complex interdependent system where ultimately you need all three bits.

And what order you learn them in is kind of an aside. But is it broadly agreed that the ethics comes last, even if we don't know what comes first? Or does some people maybe even start with the ethics? No, I think that at least one of the Stoics put physics last, and the highest bit of physics would have been theology. So that would have been the kind of grand finale in terms of someone's education. Yeah, yeah. So that would be the first thing to say. So logic isn't necessarily the ultimate foundation, but it's a central piece for sure.

And the other thing would be to say is that when they're talking about logic, they mean something much. broader than just the kind of formal logical argumentation that we've just been talking about. So logic includes everything to do with logos. And the Greek word logos means reason, argument, it means word, so language more broadly. And I suppose, and within logic broadly conceived, they would include epistemology, so theories of knowledge where we get our ideas from. And the Stoics are empiricists. So the kind of the foundational claim, I suppose, in Stoic logic is that we're empiricists. So we gain knowledge through the senses.

We gain information and through our senses. We receive that in our minds. The Stoics think that we then kind of translate that into propositions, right? So you see a cat sitting on the mat. Your mind is presented with this proposition. The cat is on the mat. and then you decide whether to assent to that proposition or not. You either say yes or no, I believe it or I don't believe it.

And if you say yes, I believe that, then that creates the belief in your mind that the cat is on the mount. And of course, if that belief is true, then you have knowledge. And then the formal logic that we were just talking about, that's kind of constructed out of all these propositions that are in your head. So knowledge through the senses first. you ascend or reject to the information you receive, that creates these beliefs in the form of propositions, and then you start constructing your logical arguments off the back of it. And so that's the kind of what logic is concerned about.

And if your senses are reliable and you are sent correctly and you don't make mistakes, and then your arguments are valid, you're going to end up with knowledge out of the other end of this kind of process. Right. So the Stoics believe in empiricism, they think that all knowledge ultimately comes from the input that we get from the world through our senses, our eyes and our ears and things like that, which, you know, sounds sensible. And people will say, well, I've heard of that view of empiricism. You know, someone like David Hume might come to mind. And some people, if I'm not mistaken, think that the Stoics kind of anticipate this Humeian picture of the world.

Like people have probably heard of David Hume and some of his ways of looking at the world. And the Stoics weren't too dissimilar, at least in their epistemology here, right? Yes, that's true. I mean, the other famous early modern empiricist is John Locke. And in John Locke's famous essay, he described the mind at birth as like a blank sheet of paper on which experience writes our beliefs. And we have information that the Stoic also had already said that at birth the mind is like a blank sheet of paper on which impressions. stamp themselves. So that core modern

empiricist idea is already in stoicism. Absolutely 100%. One sort of corollary of this is that if all of our knowledge comes through the senses and the mind is a blank

sheet of paper, then there are no innate ideas. There's no pre-existing information that we have already. And that's obviously a challenge to kind of platonic idea that we kind of have some kind of innate knowledge that we simply recollect and bring back to our minds through experience. Yes, and the Stoics sort of position themselves against Plato's views in some important ways, right? So one of the things that Plato is

most famous for is his sort of dealing with universals. So I'm sat on chair and you're sat on a chair. these are not the same chair yours is over there, mine's over here, they're in different positions, they're made out of different physical material and yet they're both chairs so there's something that they've got in common that they share and yet they're totally separate things and so Plato is like

well that's because there's this form of chairness in which they both participate and the physical world is just a sort of imperfect reflection of this perfect realm of forms where there's the form of chair in the form of the good and the form of justice and all this kind of stuff. And so this is a way of saying that individual chairs participate in this universal thing called chairness. The Stoics, and for Plato, that means that there is this realm of forms. And when you interact with the

world, you're kind of drawing upon that other realm. And for Plato, weirdly, it's also, yeah, it's got this like memory thing. It's like you're bringing it back from your like premortal memory of the realm of forms or whatever. The Stoic, don't agree with Plato, as we've just said. But then the Stoics are confronted with the same question. As a chair here, as a chair there, they seem to have something in common. But if all we have are our empirical observations of something over there and something over here, how do the Stoics deal with this problem of universal chairness?

Yeah, so just like modern empiricists, they're going to argue that that concept of chair that we have is something that we've constructed on the basis of experiencing lots of things that have certain similarities. But the concept is simply something we've constructed after the event, you know, after experience. It's not something that's come beforehand. Yeah. Plato's effectively saying, well, you wouldn't even be able to recognize these two things as chairs unless you already had the concept of chair in some sense in your head. And so that's the view that the Stoics would want to challenge. No, no, no, no, we just kind of, we develop these concepts as we go.

And so they're ultimately the product of convention. And so we just sort of take objects in the world that are material things arranged in different ways, and we kind of put labels on them, call that a table and that a chair. There's no like real category called tables and chairs. That's just something that I've invented. Now, I've talked about in the context of myeriology and called that myriological nihilism, but another good word of this is nominalism, is to say that, you know, that is a table. in name only. There's not a real category of table. It's just a name that I've given it. And in the

modern world, yeah, we call that nominalism. And do you think it's therefore fair to say that the Stoics are one of our earliest sort of schools of nominalism? Yeah, I think that's, I think that is fair to say. I mean, I'd perhaps add that a couple of figures just before them, interestingly, he didgerne, he's the cynic, right? The guy who is supposedly only interested in flamboyant ethics also challenged Plato on some of these issues and sort of said, well, you know, you talk about tablehood, where the hell is this? I've never seen this. You know, I can see tables. I can't see the idea of table. And so you get the sense that perhaps the cynics were kind of in this space as well, also challenging Plato on some of these ideas. And so maybe that's also part of the cynic inheritance

that Stoicism takes up. But Stoicism, so far as the evidence we have, really develops and runs with it and makes it into part of a much more consistent and fully developed theory. Yeah, and another person who disagreed with Plato about forms and the existence of universals is Aristotle. People are probably more familiar with the idea of Plato follow Socrates and Aristotle comes after Plato, and they sort of disagree. with and improve upon each other. And so Aristotle also disagrees with the existence of forms and the way that Plato had them, but in a different kind of way to the Stoics, right? They sort of deal with the problem differently?

Yes. So Aristotle does think that there are things as forms which, I mean, I think it's a sort of thing that modern philosophers would call natural kinds, something like that. So, you know, there are, I mean, we were talking about chairs and tables, right, which is just artificial. But if we're talking about, say, different species of animals, which is very much what Aristotle was interested in, then it's like, okay, there are birds over here, there are horses over here. This isn't just us arbitrarily coming up with labels and making distinctions. The distinction between these different types of creatures is, you know, a fact of nature.

So in that sense, there's a form of horse, and you can go and look at individual horses and point at them, and you can see the form of horse, it's right there. It doesn't exist independently of those individual horses, but there's clearly a shared set of properties that all these horses have, which is beyond just what we are choosing to think about it. And that seems like a really good, sensible thing for Aristotle to say, right? He's a really smart guy. I'm a huge fan of Aristotle, too. But the Stoics don't go down that route so much. They don't want to talk about forms in precisely that sense. Although they do talk about objects in the natural world having certain qualities.

And this is where it gets really quite complex and difficult to sort of piece it all together. So they kind of acknowledge that there are kind of qualities that the objects will have. But they'll resist talking about forms, having any existence beyond the particulars. So there's a certain amount of common ground with Aristotle there in that we're interested in particular things existing. And of course, also like Aristotle there, their empiricists, as we've said. So in that sense, both Aristotle and the Stoics can seem surprisingly modern compared to the kind of the popular view of Plato, for instance, which looks quite different. Yeah. And so we've talked about how knowledge comes into our minds, like according to the Stoics,

we've got this kind of empiricism. And we've talked a little bit about sort of logic, what they do with the resulting information. But let's talk about the actual nature of the world. Let's talk about their metaphysics. And I think this is where we move from talking about logic, or logos, which, as you say, encompasses more than just propositional logic, the epistemology stuff as well. But on top of that, we might want to build a picture of what the world actually looks like. So I guess we can start by just saying that the Stoics are materialists about the world.

They don't believe in anything except for sort of physical matter. And how would they cash out what that means? Yes. So famously, they say only bodies exist. So physical things in the world. And connecting up with what we're just saying about nominalism, they also say only particulars exist, right? No universals, no platonic forms. So particular individual physical objects, that's the architecture of the world. That's what's real. And so in that sense, we would,

yeah, we'd naturally describe them as materialists. So that's the kind of the basic foundational idea. But they overcomplicate things. Well, I say overcomplicate things. So just as Aristotle had talked about physical objects being a mixture of what he called matter and form, Right. So there's the horse. It has the form of a horse. It has the shape, the structure, and there's the matter that it's made out of. And so the horse is a combination of matter and form. This is his hyalomorphism, right? The Stoics also think that everything in the world is a combination of two things. One of which they will call matter. And the other, which is, and this is where it gets really difficult. They call Pneuma, which is breath or sph. as it becomes later in later tradition. And I mean, let's call it breath, right? So they think everything is a combination of matter and breath. They say that matter is the passive element and breath is the active element.

And every physical object in the world is a combination of these two things. Now, superficially, that might sound a bit like what Aristotle's saying, right? There's the form that gives something its structure and its kind of identity, and then there's the matter that's just the stuff that it's made out of. The Stoics are kind of saying the same thing, but with one really important difference, which is the Pneumeral Breth, they think, is another material component. So these are both material principles that in some way are mixed together, a kind of passive matter, but with some kind of material active principle permeating it,

which is giving it its structure, or in the case of living beings, is making them to be alive, right? So in the case of a human being, we are a body made out of matter, but our entire body is permeated with this breath, which they identify with our soul, which is the thing that makes us alive. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada,

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for panoramic volume with lashes that are so fanned out. Eyes appear 1.4 times bigger. See life in panorama because you're worth it. Shop L'Oreal-Paris Panorama Mascara on Amazon now. Do they also view chairs and tables in that way as having this breath? And if so, it might make sense. Because again, we've got to be careful with our terms here because we're translating. But also when you say like breath or potentially spirit as it came to be known, people might think,

oh, I don't believe in spirits and breath, but the stoics are materialists. So they're talking about a physical thing in the world. Okay, so maybe in us it's the thing that gives us like life. But what is it in a table? What is this breath component to the table? Yeah. So it's going to be in the table, for sure, in all inanimate objects. And it's going to be the thing that gives the table its structure, its hardness, its quality.

So it's the thing that holds it together. Right? So it's not just a, so that we're not just looking at a pile of dust. Yeah. Right. And so the Stoics will say that this breath has, it always has a degree of tension. And that the higher the degree of tension, the breath has, the more complex the object. So the most basic level of tension gives cohesion to the table or the chair. A next higher level of tension will give plants their kind of principle of life.

And then in animals, it will give the principle of kind of perception and movement. And then in human beings, it will give rationality. And in each case, what we're seeing is an increase in tension. So, I mean, this is often referred to as the scale of nature. So there's no radical difference in kind between. any of these different things, there's no difference in kind between the human rational mind and an animal mind or even what's going on in a plant. As one scholar has put it, what we're really thinking about here is different levels of complexity.

So the breath is what is giving objects, the complex organisation that makes them what they are. Yeah. I mean, this is really interesting for so many reasons. One is that, again, this doesn't sound too far detached from. from Aristotle and his view of the soul. So Aristotle, many people will know, some people will not, that he believed that all living things had souls, but that there were kind of different levels of souls or different sort of kinds of souls. And again, it sort of starts to sound a bit wishy, washy, oh, I don't believe in that stuff. But again, for Aristotle, a soul is not some

magical thing that sort of exists inside of you. A soul is like a sort of physical arrangement, essentially. It's like a form of matter. And he believed that plants had the lowest level of soul, which gave them their sort of qualities they have. They can take things in, follow the sun and stuff. Animals had that plus a bit. They've got like locomotion. They can move around. And then humans have that plus a bit, which is rationality.

Again, the Stoics seem to be saying something kind of similar, but just like cashing it out in different terms. and also saying that it's not just a continuum between plants and up to humans, but from humans all the way down to like physical objects, including artefacts like tables and chairs, right? Yeah. Do you think that that is a fair comparison to draw, in other words, as like a touch point for people who are familiar with Aristotle? Yeah, absolutely.

I think you can see there's a similar structure in the way that they're thinking. I mean, as I say, they're both empiricists, stoics, Aristotelians, they're both interested in developing a scientific understanding of the world. They're both broadly materialist. There's quite a lot of common ground in the theoretical philosophy, even if there are also some important differences. And the way in which they're using terms, like the word suke that we translate as soul, I mean, they have the same understanding of this word because it's just common philosophical currency. Yeah.

And, you know, and it's, again, I mean, a word like soul can. sort of raise all sorts of red flags for some people, right? They might have a problem with this. I mean, it's not really complicated or difficult. If you've got a living human being and you've got a corpse, right? What's the difference between the two? One of them has soul and one of them doesn't. Soul is simply the thing that explains why it is that this thing's alive and that and that thing's dead.

Even if that's like a material thing, that's just something in the brain or the heart or whatever, whatever that thing is, is just what's being called a soul. But weirdly, I suppose here, if you had a corpse and a living human being, Aristotle would look at those two things. And Aristotle would say, the living being has got a soul, the corpse does not. Whereas the Stoics would say that both of them have breath. It's just that the living being has a lot more tension in the sort of organization of the breath than the corpse does. And that's what gives it this extra sort of stuff. Right? Is that fair?

Yeah, I think that's exactly what they're going to have to say. There's a sense in which the corpse has lost some of its complexity or attention. And I want to ask how is this related to specifically the fact that the height of the soul for Aristotle is like the rational human being. It's like this ability to use reason. And Stoics will also look at humans and this extra special thing they have. And yeah, they've got this quality of rationality allows us to do logic and stuff. And if they've got this sort of continuum that goes down to the basis, do they intend for us to take that sort of quality of rationality, consciousness, that kind of thing, and sort of extend it all the way down to the baseline of reality? Or is there a point at which we're no longer really talking about the same kind of thing anymore? Because in other words, I mean, like, we do a lot of philosophy of mind on the show and we talk about competing views of materialism and idealism and panpsychism and stuff. And some of the stuff that Stoics say about this, like, continuum of stuff, it's just like more

complexly arranged when it comes to a plant than an animal than a human, ties in quite nicely with some of these views of consciousness, which say that it's like, you know, it's present, foundationally in the universe. It's just really rudimentary. And it's when you put it together complexly that you get like human brains. Is there like a parallel to draw here with stoic thought, do you think? Yes, I think so. And this, this, this active principle that permeates and and animates the world and organizes the world. As I said, they use this word breath, but they also will use the word logos to describe this active principle.

So it's reason that's permeating everything. So there's a sense in which reason goes all the way down, right? There's a rationality to the way in which the inanimate world operates as well, we might say. You know, there's a structure. So in that sense that they certainly would want to stress that continuum. And of course, all of these things, right, all of these particular physical things that exist, whether it be human beings, plants, tables, chairs, are all parts of the totality of nature. And as well as saying that only individual particular bodies exist,

they also want to stress the fact that we are all parts of a single entity called nature, like with a capital N. And there's a kind of an order and a logic and a reason to the way in which nature as a whole works, which is this logical principle sort of at work. When we say that someone is a materialist, that everything's just made out of matter, there are kind of two ways, I think, that we can picture what's happening here. To be a materialist, you either take the sort of high-flying stuff that typically is thought to be kind of a bit out there and immaterial, things like, you know,

consciousness, justice, universals, and you grab them and you just drag them down to the level of atoms and physics and stuff like that. Or you take the sort of the arena of physics and atoms and stuff and you kind of elevate them into this sort of higher plane of like reason and log-offs. And it kind of sounds to me like the stoics are doing something more like the latter in that like the modern materialist who's like a reductionist who thinks everything is, you know, you could drag it down to this level is not actually quite doing the same thing as the Stoic, which sounds, from what I'm hearing, like, a bit more like elevating almost. Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

And, I mean, at the time when the Stoics are active in Athens, the kind of famous other competing school of philosophy are the Epicureans, who are kind of, you know, reductive atomists in many respects. And so the world is simply the product of this dead, inert bits of matter that just randomly bump into one another and things like consciousness are going to have to be emergent properties that in some way come out of the interaction of of of of these lifeless atoms and so the big kind of philosophy of mind question is well how on earth does that happen right you just you stick enough bits of of dead matter together and suddenly consciousness appears how does that

work right no one has an answer to that question so that would be the challenge to that version of materialism um and that was a challenge of challenge that the Stoics in antiquity were already raising. So, I mean, for instance, one of the arguments that they'll give will be that if human beings have consciousness, then consciousness must be a property of nature as a whole. I mean, slightly anachronistic to use the word consciousness, but you kind of, you know what I mean, right? To be rational and animate.

Oh, you're talking about sort of logos, right? really, like this sort of reasonableness, I guess. Yeah. So they'll explicitly say that this can't be an emergent property. It must already be in nature if we have it. And so they'll very explicitly want to challenge that version of reductive materialism. So, and that's it. That jumped out at me because I sometimes get accused on this show of sort of,

I get really interested in like an idea like idealism or pancychism or something. And I get accused of sort of bringing people on and just like, just talking about how wonderful that is. But I was preparing to speak with you and I was reading about the Stoic view of like reason permeating the world and this kind. And I was like, damn, we're going to have to do the consciousness thing again because it really does sound like they're getting at a similar thing. And I was just surprised. I had no idea that the Stoics even thought about this stuff, let alone like had this interpretation of, you know, reason as an animating principle of the entire universe. I think it's fascinating. But, okay, like when I talk about idealism or panpsychism, the question is, okay, if you kind of believe that there's this, that the universe itself then must have some kind of consciousness or that everything's made up of some, like, breath and that kind of sounds a little bit religious.

Kind of sounds like maybe we're describing the universe as a kind of God in the way that Spinoza does, where when we say materialism and nature, we're talking about a very elevated form of the natural. world, which some people think it might be sensible to call God. So the question is, and I know this is something of a trick question, but you're probably the person to ask, did the Stoics believe in God? Yes, they did, right? And exactly along the lines that Spinoza would do much, much later, they identify God with nature. Or to be more precise, they identify God with this active principle that animates nature. So God is Zeus, is Logos, is divine breath, is divine fire. They have endless names for this same thing again and again, right? So, yeah, God is the active principle within nature that unifies and unites the whole thing.

So God is the soul of the world, we might say. Just as the active animate breath within us is our soul and makes us alive, God is the active animate breath that animates all of nature as a whole. And one of the consequences of that is that our individual souls are fragments of this divine soul that animates the whole show. So they definitely believe in God. They're definitely pantheists. God is imminent. And because we're talking about, we're still talking about the natural world, we're still safely within the claim that it's only physical bodies that exist.

Yeah, well, that's the interesting thing, isn't it? that it sounds kind of jarring almost to talk about, you know, us being sort of fractured souls that participate in one great big soul that the universe is made out of. But they're materialists. It's like, do you think our sort of modern conception of materialism is a bit of an anachronism? When we're talking about the Stoics, to use materialism today, it seems to mean that kind of reductionist, like everything is emergent of like small particles kind of thing. Do you think that's still an accurate term to describe the Stoics? Yeah, that's a really good question.

And I mean, you're absolutely right. That kind of sort of reductive atomism was the kind of dominant version of materialism in the early modern period when all of these categories really started to solidify. I mean, and you could ask similar questions about Aristotle too, I think. Right. So they're both naturalist philosophies, right? It's only things within the natural world that exist. But in both cases, they're going to want to argue, well, there's kind of dead inert matter,

but there's also something else you need in order to really understand what's going on, just thinking that there's inert matter isn't enough on its own. And so the Stoics will have this divine reason that animates things Aristotle will have his, you know, will say that form is really important. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, as long as you've got that, idea in the back of your mind that materialism comes in a variety of forms, then I think we're probably safe. But the word naturalism is right. It feels broader and more encompassing.

Yeah. Maybe that's the better term to you. And I think people take issue with the word materialism today as well. And the preferred term in some context is physicalism, because materialism is a bit of a nebulous term. They say, well, what we're really talking about is physicalism, the view that everything is essentially reducible to like physical interactions. And so maybe you could see materialism as like the category in which you have these competing views of what you might call physicalism, which is the reductive thing, and like naturalism, which is like everything is nature, but there's maybe a little bit more room for this kind of stuff. Interestingly, the Stoics also have a bit of a weird view about like literally the nature of the world, right? Like we say

everything that exists is the natural world. There are a lot of debates in antiquity, as there still are today about whether the world or the universe, we might say today, is whether it had a beginning, whether it's infinite, whether it's finite, whether it's got edges. And the Stoics had some pretty specific views on this, right? The scorebed app here with trusted stats in real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. That's not really what I do. Is that because you don't have any Or?

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It starts to get slightly weird, right? This is the stuff that the modern fans of Stoicism will kind of have no interest in whatsoever. But it is part of the theory. Notice how like miles away we are from the sort of like, you know, if you lose your possessions, then you can control your own emotions. Like, yeah, I hope it's becoming clear to people that stoicism is a lot more than just that. Yeah. So, yeah, we've got nature identified with God, a living being. So, nature is alive, right? And like any other living being, nature will have its life cycle. And so this is where it starts to get crazy. So the stoic view is that the natural world is in effect born at a certain moment. And it has its life cycle. And at the end of this life cycle, it is then destroyed. And the moment of birth and the moment of destruction is characterized as all of the passive matter being consumed by the active principle, identified with reason, identified with God, identified with breath, but also identified with fire. This is an idea that they take from the earlier Greek philosopher Heraclitus. And they suggest that the entire world is consumed

in fire. It's kind of a moment of singularity. Everything becomes pure active principle. So everything becomes pure God, right? And then it's reborn, kind of like a phoenix, sort of. And then God has another life cycle, right? So, as I say, some of these ideas may have come from Heraclitus, the idea that there's Logos animating nature, the idea that fire is a kind of key principle. And so God has this life cycle.

And each cycle, they say, is identical, right? So again, the idea of eternal recurrence that is often associated with Nietzsche. The Stoics never use that phrase, but they effectively have that theory, right? If the world is organized rationally by this divine principle, then what he's going to produce is going to be perfect. So why would he change it second time round? So you're going to get exactly the same cycle, second time, third time, and so on. So you have cyclical time and you have endless repetition of exactly the same events. And again, the Stoics are interested in the logical puzzles, right?

So is Socrates in cycle one the same as Socrates and cycle two, right? And the same as Socrates and cycle three, right? If it's exactly the same life that's going through. Can you even distinguish between individual cycles if they're identical? All those sorts of philosophical problems then are kind of discussed in the literature. Yeah. So there's some quite like specific and kind of weird views that are thoroughly, I mean, they're really beginning to sound quite like theological. This is extremely, although materialists and empiricists have quite fanciful sort of views on cosmology. I mean, there's a whole subsection in your book on stoicism. I'm talking about the sort of academic one, the rootledge one. Is it rootledge or routelage? How do you say that? I've never, I've never known for sure. Routledge, I tend to... Routledge.

Let's go with that. I won't claim to be... Yeah. Well, you've got a whole subsection. I mean, you follow this course of, like, logic, physics, ethics. But within physics, you have a whole subsection on cosmology because they have these views. And don't they also have a view about, like, sort of the size of the universe and it's like edges? Yeah.

And how it sits in a void? So... So... So... So... this this this this

this this this this single unified nature identified with God

is spherical in shape I think they probably thought that the earth was at

the center of this just as Aristotle did now when it's all consumed by

by fire it's I think they think it gets bigger I can't I honestly can't remember

off top of my head where they think it gets bigger or smaller. Check the book afterwards, folks. But I think he thinks that it gets slightly bigger, right? And so as a consequence, it needs space to expand into. And so as a consequence, they think that there must be void outside of nature in order for it to expand and contract in this moment of conflagration. By contrast, I mean, Aristotle also thought the world was spherical, but he thought there was nothing beyond its limits. So again, that's them in dialogue with Aristotle, offering a slightly different theory and saying,

no, no, no, logically, we're going to have to say that there's void beyond the limits of the natural world. And don't they use this argument? I don't know if the Stoics use this per se or if this was floating around at the time, but when debating, you know, the edge of the universe, is there something beyond it or like a void or is that just where everything ends? There's this thought experiment. Well, if you put a person at the edge of the universe and you told them to like lift up

their arm to like sort of push it out of the universe, One of two things would happen. Either their arm would sort of go through the wall, in which case there's something outside that the arm's going into, or the arm would be prevented. It would sort of hit up against the edge. But if it hits up against the edge, there must be something beyond the edge to stop the arm. So given that those are the only two options, either way, there must be something outside of the universe. And that's one of the arguments given for why this void outside must exist. Yeah, exactly.

So that was a famous objection raised by an ancient philosopher called Architis. that he raised against Aristotle. When Aristotle says there's nothing beyond the limit, he comes up with that brilliant objection, right? It's clever, right? It always makes me think of the Truman show, the movie, where the guy gets to the end, and then he's kind of knocking against the edge of the world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yes, surely there's got to be something beyond. And so part of the stoic claim that there must be void is a way of avoiding that objection also. Okay, so one thing I think we have to mention then is, we'll have to rewind ever so slightly here and that we were talking about materialism before. So, as you put it, the Stoics believe that only bodies exist. So anything which exists is like, you know, physically embodied, like tables and chairs and stuff.

But we've just said that there is a void outside of the earth, which presumably the void kind of has nothing in it. There's no physical matter there. And there are other things that the Stoics believe in, like the existence of time, like, like the existence of meaning that we ascribed to propositions earlier. And these are things which the Stoics think exist. They think the void's there, they think time's there. Yet these things aren't made out of matter, are they?

No. So what's going on? Yeah. So they call these things incorporeals. So they're not corporeal, they're not physical. one of the defining characteristics of bodies that we've said exist is that they can act and be acted upon, right? So they causally interact with one another, right? And so that's one of the reasons why they say, look, the soul must be physical in some sense because it has causal power, right?

And it makes things happen. But these things don't. Void doesn't make anything happen. So it can be incorporeal, that's fine. And again, the same with something like time or, as you said, the means. The meaning of our propositions is something that's kind of non-physical. We can tell that epistemological story about information arising from the external world into our sense organs being processed in our brains. And we can describe that in purely physical terms.

But the actual sense or meaning of what we're thinking is the non-physical bit. So that is also one of these incorporeals. So they do have those kind of exceptions. Now, I mean, critics would challenge the Stoics on this, right? And they would say, well, what on earth has linguistic meaning and void and time got to do with each other? This seems like a slightly random rag bag collection of things that don't neatly fit into your materialist theory. And so you've just kind of sort of thrown them together and said, okay, we'll say they're in incorporio or two. Right.

So some people will say maybe this is a weak point. in Stoicism. Yeah. They had to kind of acknowledge these things exist. The other one is place, right? Because there are four. There are four of these incorporeal things that the Stoics believe in.

There's time. There's place. So like where the physical object goes. That's not like made out of stuff because it's where the stuff goes. Yeah. But it's like it's there. And there's the void. And then there's this lector, right?

Or the meaning of propositions. Because they think that propositions are physical. They think that vibrations in the air and then, you know, the air sort of hits the eardrum and, and whatnot. But in theory, I could say all of that in French, and it's the same physical stuff. The words are being said, but if you don't speak French,

you won't get the meaning. So there's like this extra thing, which is incorporeal. So they accept the existence of those. And yeah, it's a little bit weird. If their metaphysics is true, it's like the universe is made out of this stuff, except for these random little bits. But also it makes me think, you know,

when we said earlier, well, yeah, the Stoics are materialists and they think only bodies exist. Doesn't this just kind of make that, like, untrue? Well, they would say that these incorporeal things don't exist, but they are in some sense real. So they'll want to draw a kind of metaphysical distinction between those two types of thing. Between existence and like realness. Yes. So there can be something that's real but doesn't exist.

It's similar to how some like some important medieval, like religious thinkers believed that things could exist like in the intellect. And they're essentially talking about like imagination here. So you can imagine a unicorn, and the unicorn doesn't exist. It's not in the world, but it's real in the sense that I can imagine it, in a way that I can't imagine a four-sided triangle. Like, that definitely isn't real and doesn't exist. The unicorn, even though it's not in the world, it's still got something more than the four-sided triangle,

because there's a sense in which that has more existence than the four-sided triangle, but it's still not in the real world. So maybe thinking in those terms will be helpful to understanding why you might say something is like real, it's really there, but it doesn't exist. But then maybe again, the Stoics just need to sort of adapt their terminology. I mean, that's quite a convenient thing to do, isn't it, to just say, of all of these things that challenge your view of what exists, you say, well, yeah, no, I'm still right that they don't exist, but they're still real, and they, what do they, they say they, they, like, subsist.

Yeah, I mean, these are all kind of imperfect English translations for the kind of technical terms that they're using. But yes, subsist is often how it's translated. I mean, just to flesh out their metaphysical picture a bit more, I mean, they suggest that the highest category, the highest metaphysical category is designated by the Greek word T, which means something, right? So, in other words, the highest category is particularity, right? So again, this is part the nominalism, right, and the rejection of platonic forms. The broadest category is something. And then under that category, there are two lower categories. There are bodies, so always particular physical bodies, and then there are these incorporeals. And so these incorporeals

are always specific things. So we're talking about the meaning of individual propositions, or if we're talking about void, it's like, you know, the void is, you know, right here outside, the edge of the outside the edge of the universe. These don't become kind of universals sort of through the back door. So particularity is the top category and then we have reality and existence. Or maybe a better way of putting it to say that the highest category of something, this is the level of reality. And under that top category, we then got bodies that exist and then these incorporers that subsist.

That's probably a better way of putting it. Yeah, and it's worth pointing out, you know, this is a world view that had its critics. And if you're listening to this and going, well, that just sounds ridiculous. Maybe it is. Maybe this is just a shortcoming of soicism, but we're trying today to work out at least what it was that they believed. And the sources for this kind of stuff, like, it's quite specific. And we've already said that a lot of the early Stoic literature, at least, is lost. So are these things that we're picking up through fragments?

Are these things that we've learned from later Stoic writers? Like where is this sort of confident information coming from? Yeah, that's a really good question. So most of it is coming from, or a lot of it is coming from hostile sources. So there's a little bit in Seneca in a couple of Seneca's letters where he touches on some of these metaphysical ideas, which again is quite interesting because it challenges the thought that all he's interested in is kind of practical ethics. So he does engage with these ideas in passing. much later, sort of towards the end of antiquity, we have a whole series of neoplatonists who are writing commentaries on Aristotle, and they give us a lot of information about Stoic metaphysics and a lot of these details.

But they're writing from a plenical point of view. So they're often presenting these ideas in contrast to Aristotle and saying, why, the Stoics have got things wrong. Yeah. So that's a problem. Some of the other stuff we were talking about earlier in terms of God, permeating the natural world and all of those sorts of questions, we have material in Cicero. So Cicero writes a book called On the Nature of the Gods, where he talks about Stoic theology. And so there we get a slightly fuller account, which goes into a bit more detail.

But yes, in all of this, we are piecing together scraps of information, doing our best to make sense of it. and at some points we might just say you know what this makes no sense or this is just unconvincing but then we always have to remind ourselves well we don't actually have the books where this was set out in full exactly so yeah it's like if you

again like if you were only ever reading the god delusion you might think Christianity is pretty implausible well many people read the Bible and think it's implausible too but you get what I'm saying yeah but of course I think it's time I think it's time to do it it's the ethics of course a lot of this stuff is from

you know, like hostile sources and whatnot. But like you said, some of the, the majority of the texts which we still have today are from this so-called later Stoer or Roman Stoer, which has come to be associated with ethics. And maybe that is just a historical contingency. Maybe they wrote and read all about physics and logic and it just didn't survive. But nonetheless, today, popularly, stoicism is kind of understood as an ethical philosophy. So I want to ask you then, what is the ethical worldview of the Stoics? And more specifically, now we can probably answer the question of like, why? Like, how do we get from this view of the world and the universe and the eternal fire recreation stuff to quite particular ethical doctrines? What's that story?

Yes. So, I mean, I think it's also worth saying that if you just read the works of the Roman Stoics, you'll get a certain ethical worldview, but you won't get the kind of fundamental underpinning principles. And so if you really want to understand Stoic ethics, you've also got to go back to our Athenians. And in this case, we've got a fairly full account of early Stoic ethics that Cicero preserves for us. And although Cicero wasn't a Stoic, he's reasonably sympathetic towards Stoic ethics. So he gives a fairly full and kind of, and fairly friendly account, we might say. And so we talked a bit earlier about Socrates and the idea that it's virtue or character that's the most important thing for living a good life.

In order to understand how the Stoics get to that, I mean, I'll just sort of set out the basic principles, right? So the starting point is the very simple idea, the very simple observation, that all animals, including humans, have a basic instinct to self-preservation, right? So we're all just trying to survive and we will pursue things that we think will help us survive and we will avoid things that we think will harm us, right? So food and water good, big scary animal bad, right? Simple as that. And that's how we ascribe value to things, the Stoics think.

So again, a completely naturalistic way of thinking about value, right? You don't need a platonic ideal form of the good, right? Food and water good, that protects me. scary animal bad. So we have a naturalistic account of values. So that kind of fits with what we've already been saying about the metaphysics and the logic. But the stories think that as we develop as human beings, we reach a certain point where we come to see ourselves not merely as animals fighting for survival. We see ourselves as rational agents and we have certain sets of values.

and we start to value things like being decent towards other people or having integrity or being rationally consistent in our beliefs. And we start to identify ourselves as that type of person, right? I'm the sort of person who's rationally consistent, who acts with integrity, who behaves well towards other people around me. And if I start to identify myself with those, those sorts of characteristics, if I start to identify myself with that kind of character, I'll come to realize it's the preservation of that character that is what my self-preservation

actually looks like. And my survival is not on whether I can feed this physical body, right? Although that's kind of a pre, obviously still a precondition. my survival as a rational agent is on me preserving all of those character traits that make me who I am and make me a kind of a human being. And so that leads the Stoics to this thought that it's our character that is the single most important thing for living a good life. That's the thing that we want to preserve. And then they'll say that all of the other. things that we initially valued, like food and shelter and so on, we initially called those good,

but now we're going to say it's our virtuous character that's the only thing that's really good. That's the thing that enables us to live a good life. That's the thing that guarantees our preservation as a rational human being. And all those other things are things that we still naturally pursue, but we're not going to call those good anymore, right? We're going to call those preferred or dispreferred. So food, shelter, money, health. These are all preferred things. Of course, we all want them. We have this natural instinct to pursue them.

And their opposites are going to be dispreferred. But they're not so essential for us to living a good life or even to surviving. What really matters is developing this rational character. And that in particular was a bit of a controversy in early stoicism, right? Because you've kind of got this realization that the thing that really makes you, like yourself, is your character. and that your sort of physical self is secondary to that, that the most important thing about you is who you are as a person, and virtual will get you there.

So all of this other stuff, like food and shelter, although we kind of want to say it's good, it's not really good. And so the early sort of stoic position on this is that they are so-called indifference, like with a, not indifference with a CE, with a T.S. Like they are indifferent things, things you should be indifferent to. And yet some Stoics were like, okay, yeah, they don't really matter. We're not going to call them good, but I do prefer food to starvation. And although, as you've told us, we inherit this sort of view of Stoicism that there are preferred and dispreferred indifference.

But there's sort of another way this could have gone because there were some people who thought that there shouldn't be this concept of preferred and dispreferred, right? Yes. So, I mean, we mentioned much earlier that Zeno spent time studying with the cynics. Right. And so he inherits this Socratic idea from the cynics. It's all about Virtuous character. And as we said then, Diogenes and Cretes and the other cynics take this idea of an attitude of indifference towards the external world to a kind of extreme view where you don't care about anything whatsoever. And so the introduction of this distinction between preferred and dispreferred, this looks like it's a key distinctive, stoic idea in particular that Xeno-intruging.

uses that differentiates stoic ethics from cynic ethics. Right. Right. So the cynics will say everything external is just a matter of indifference. And Zeno will say, no, we're still going to have choices and make preferences. And as you say, there are some early figures at that time who want to push back against that and say, no, no, no, we prefer the more cynic view. And I mean, what's interesting if you sort of track through the Stoic tradition, which is lasting over 500 years, you'll find different people place different emphasis on this idea. So a very famous writer a bit later called Panaitius, who was in the sort of second, first century BC at the time when these ideas were taking up in Rome.

He really stresses the importance of things being preferred. and sort of moves away from the sort of cynic side of things we might say. A little later, someone like Epictetus, you know, a very famous Stoic that lots of people read today, he barely mentions this distinction at all. I mean, quite strikingly. I mean, I've just said that this is the defining idea in Stoic ethics that's distinguish it from the cynics. It rarely appears in Epictetus. So Petitius, it's virtue, virtue all the way.

just focus on virtue, that's all that matters. You don't need to worry about whether things are preferred or dispreferred. So there's almost as if there's a range of views within, you know, what's quite a broad church of Stoic ethical thinking. Yeah, but there's also maybe this thought that, okay, so the Stoics want to say that none of this physical stuff really matters. What matters is your, I shouldn't say physical, none of this like external stuff,

none of this non-character-related stuff really matters. and then they go, I am a bit hungry. But no, no, no, that's not good. That's just, it's just preferred. Like, can't someone listening to that sort of go like, but you're still seeking food? You're still seeking shelter.

And, okay, you don't want to call them good because that conflicts with your philosophy, but maybe you just should. Maybe you're just calling them good by other names if you're allowing this, like, indifferent thing. So, like, you know, Aristotle thought that virtue was the most important thing, but he also did think,

that like these external things were good. You know, they were useful and worthwhile and achieving virtue and getting to eudaimonia, you know, the ultimate state of happiness for the ancient Greeks. And if I'm not mistaken, some early critics of Stoicism like Carnadis and somebody else, a few other people were like criticizing the Stoics for saying, you're kind of just saying the same thing as Aristotle, you know? So is that fair? Because it sounds like, to me a little bit like, I'm all on board with these stoic ideas, but when they say food isn't good,

but it is preferable, I'm like, what's the difference? Yeah, and you're absolutely right. So people did raise that objection in antiquity. And again, Cicero in one of his books on ends, he kind of outlines all of this

and raises precisely these sorts of objections, right? Are you just kind of playing with words? Are you just varying terminology, but is the basic idea, identical. And there's one line of argument there which suggests that the Stoics and the Aristidesans are basically saying the same thing just in using different vocabulary. But the key issue is this, right?

Let's, okay, let's say that it is preferred or good for you to be in excellent health, right? So, and let's say that you're struck down with some horrible illness. Now, Stoic is going to say that if you've still got... the right frame of mind and the right character, you can still live a good, happy human life. And an Aristotelian is going to say, well, you're not, right? Your life could be better if your health were restored, right? And so that feels like a big kind of philosophical difference, right? If someone's struck down by disability, their life is worse, an Aristotelian would have to say, it could be better.

Whereas the Stoics can say no. You can still live as good a human life as anyone else so long as your character remains intact. Yeah, your life might be worse, but not because of the disability. Well, I mean, your life could be worse if you become bitter and resentful about the fact that this thing has happened, right?

But so long as you don't let that happen. Yeah. So there's a sentiment, there's something quite positive about what the Stoics are saying. Yeah. That no matter what life throws at you, no matter what happens to you, so long as you don't let that

adversely affect your frame of mind, you can still live a full, rich, human life and you don't have to feel that those things have in some way damaged or destroyed what's most important. Yes, and now it feels like we're finally approximating what people know stoicism to be. I mean, the modern, if you look in a dictionary

for the word stoic, be like, oh, you know, this person's being very stoic about it, it means that kind of thing, where they're saying, like, you know, I'm not going to allow this to upset me or change my mood or change my happiness. But hopefully, this can clear up maybe what might be a misconception and a subtle one is that the Stoics aren't kind of offering you like self-help in the sense of saying like, yeah, I know it sucks when, you know, this happens to you. But here's a way to feel better. Like, here's a way to sort of deal with the fact that this stuff's really bad and here's how to sort of get over it. They're not just doing that because, oh, it just feels better if we can just like ignore that.

that stuff, or get over it. They're saying literally, it does not affect what's good and bad. Not that, like, oh, you should treat it that way because it'll make you feel better, but like it, like, literally, like, almost as a sort of metaphysical principle, like, if you're, like, allowing illness to make you have a less happy life, it's not just that that's, like, bad advice, it's that you're actually mistaken about the nature of the world. And so, yeah, I think the sort of modern popular understanding of stoicism that comes up in the sort of self-help context, nothing wrong with it. If you want to borrow some stoic ideas and use it to apply to running a business or motivating yourself to be healthy and get in the gym and stuff like that, then great.

But you should probably be aware that that's not what stoicism is. And in fact, by applying these stoic ideas to those worldly things, you're kind of running counter to the foundation of what Stoicism is about, like, at its most fundamental level. Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting issue, and you can kind of feel it coming up quite a lot at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. If you think that you're going to take stoic ideas about kind of resilience and fortitude

in order to make you more successful and more money, then you've missed the point, right? Because part of what they're saying is precisely that that money has no inherent value. Yeah. Right. So in that sense, yes, people could miss the point. And again, you're absolutely right. They're not saying these things simply because they think it might make you feel better. They're saying it because they think it reflects facts about the world.

Yeah. So the person who might find themselves disabled or chronically ill, if they start saying this is terrible and my life has been ruined, the stork will come along and say, well, no, you're making a mistake. You fail to understand where real value resides. And it doesn't reside in physical health. It resides in your mental state. Not only have you made a mistake, you've not understood our value theory, but also you are actively damaging yourself by creating emotional turmoil in your head, which is damaging your rationality and damaging your character. So you're destroying the most important thing there is, the thing that does, where genuine goodness does reside. Yeah. And this is why it's important to understand the physics and the logic and these kinds of views of the stoics and why I think it's good to start with them is because like, you know, if you just hear about these ethical ideas,

you know, stuff that happens external to you, you know, shouldn't affect your mood or your character. you might sort of go in isolation, you might go like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. Yeah, I reckon if I adopted that view, that would be good for me. Because you sort of presuppose that you've got this thing that you think is good in the world. You know, you want to be happy and content and you want to live a nice life. And that seems like a useful thing to plug into my worldview. And again, that's fine, but the Stoics are being much stronger than that. And when you understand their metaphysical view, the ethics kind of falls out of that, you know.

They haven't just chosen it because it seems nicer to them. It's sort of a natural corollary of these beliefs about the nature of the world. Having said that, I mean, you know, the Stoics believe that the universe abides by a sort of foundational, rational principle. They kind of, they believe in God. They believe that there is this eternally recurring sort of universe, which implies it's sort of the best of all possible world because it can't be improved upon. and that's why it keeps occurring in the same way. And yet, you know, Zeno gets shipwrecked. And yet people are struck down with disability.

And yet there's all kinds of suffering that we have to deal with in the world. So the Stoics, whilst wanting to psychologically detach themselves from the sufferings of the world, given their metaphysics about God and the rational principle, have to account for that classical problem for religious people of the problem of evil. That's also a problem for Stoics, right? And I wonder if you can give us an indication of if and how they might have dealt with that. Yes. So, yeah, we do we do find Stoics touch on that problem in particular.

And again, it's the thought that, well, nature is doing what nature does for nature's best interest. It's concerned with what benefits nature as a whole, not with what is good or bad for the individual parts, right? So there's a sense in which there is a reason for anything that happens, right? There's a reason for Zeno shipwreck, right? But it's got nothing to do with Zeno. It's to do with the order of whatever weather patterns were active at that moment. I mean, here's perhaps another interesting sort to put on the table. And again, it shows us the interconnectedness of the Stoic system.

In order to answer this question, which feels like a very ethical question, and we're going to have to go back to the physics. So this animating principle within nature, God, reason, how we want to call it, the Stoics will identify this with Providence, which makes it sound as if we're in the kind of best of all possible worlds territory that you were mentioning. They also identify it with fate. And again, not fate in the sense of this is your destiny, but fate simply in the sense of cause and effect.

So there's a logic and a reason to the way the world works. And you could describe that in terms of the divine will of Zeus. But equally, you could describe that in terms of, look, there's just a logical cause and system of cause and effect. This is just the way the world works. It couldn't happen any other way, right? You were bound to get struck down with this horrible disease because of your genetic predisposition and the environment you live in.

So it was destined to happen, right? that's just nature working itself out, right? And there's nothing you can do about that. Yeah, and I think that so long as the Stoic must believe in this like, almost like perfect rationality of the universe, that it can't be improved upon, I think this becomes one of the strongest critiques of Stoicism in the same way that the problem of evil is like the biggest atheist argument

that exists for most religious traditions. It's very difficult to account for what seem to be trivial forms of suffering. I mean, you could say, well, that shipwreck had to happen because of, you know, the conditions of the wind. And then you want to say, but why were the conditions of the wind like that? Well, maybe because, you know, if that hadn't happened to Zeno, then he never would have found a soicism. Okay, but what about all the people who have a shipwreck and then die? You know, what about them?

And these questions are really difficult to answer. And I just wanted to note that they are present for stoicism. But they tend to sort of answer them in similar-ish ways to how someone who believes in the existence of the triumny god who created the universe. they sort of answer it in the same way as to how he would be compatible with evil as well. It's a sort of similar conversation that happens. In some text, yes, that's certainly true. I suppose it depends how much we want to describe this very strange, weird, Stoic God in kind of personless terms.

If we think of this Stoic God as some kind of conscious agent, then we fall into that kind of territory where it looks very much like the sorts of debates we get in monotheistic religion. But if we think of this Stoic God as simply this rational principle that organizes matter which is simply identified with cause and effect,

that doesn't sound as if it's something that is making decisions in quite the same way. And here's the really infuriating, frustrating bit in our sources we will find the Stoic God discreet. in both of those ways. Yeah, of course. In different places. And it's incredibly difficult to kind of really pin down, okay, precisely what did they

mean by this? Or are we bringing a kind of a modern set of categories and imposing them on this? I mean, again, just as an aside, we tend to think of rational science and then religion. And think of those two things as very distinct. This is a kind of sort of enlightenment inheritance. When people talk about, say, Chinese philosophy, for instance, and they talk about, I don't know, Taoism, and they say, okay, what's going on here? Is this a kind of natural philosophy? Is this religion? How do we, you know, do these categories that we're operating with really work? And some commentators will say, well, maybe these Western categories don't really fit with this Eastern way of thinking. There's a sense in which you could almost say the same about ancient Greek thinking. These post-enlightenment categories, Is that the right way to think about what these ancient Greeks are thinking about? You know, how can this be theological and materialistic at the same time?

So there are those sorts of challenges as well. I mean, just to come back to the problem of evil, though, a couple of other thoughts would be, well, one, in these situations when we're talking about evil happening, strictly speaking, the Stoics can say, there is no evil happening. Right. Right? Nothing bad has happened, right? Someone cuts your leg off.

Zeno's in his shipwreck. These are just dispreferred. They're not bad. Yeah. So there is no evil. So there is no problem of evil. Yeah. The only genuinely evil thing would be if your virtuous character was corrupted.

But, you know, easy for us to say, right? And in fact, I can't remember who it is. You quote them in your book. It's one of these early writers on Stoicism, I think. Who's, or maybe it's, maybe it's not. Who is it? You said, who's the Roman that writes about stoicism, but isn't a stoic? Cicero.

Maybe it's Cicero, where he's sort of. saying it's someone who says, you know, when I've, when I've seen you expertly console other people because they've lost their children, you know, and I think, wow, that's, you know, that's compelling the things you're saying. But I'd believe you more if you were saying about your own child. Yeah. You know, it's easy to say this kind of stuff, but the real way to prove the, the truth and efficacy of stoicism is to apply it to your own life. And I sort of imagine if my leg got cut off and you were sat there going like, you know, Alex, just dispreferred, nothing bad happened, I'd be there like, I'm not sure I'm convinced by that, you know?

Now, so interestingly, it was Seneca who said that. So it was a committed stoic who said that. Who's kind of saying, look, you know, I know the theory, but actually walking the walk, actually putting this into practice and really following through, this is hard. So he's kind of acknowledging how challenging some of these views are. Yeah. I mean, but, you know, the cut off the leg example, I mean, you know, you can think of people who, who, you know, you may even know people who have had, you know, debilitating accidents, you know,

someone who's been in a terrible car accident and has lost the use of a leg and it, you know, it really, you know, it really hits them hard and it really destroys them. And then you see other people, often ex-soldiers who lose a leg, who are off in the Paralympics doing absolutely incredible things. And no doubt it was a horrific traumatic experience to go through. but it's not slowing them down, it's not dampen their spirits, and they're just getting on with things, right? So we can see a way in which different people might respond differently to the same experience. And you know, there's a sense in which both of those reactions are perfectly understandable. Of course, I can't imagine what such a thing would be like.

However, when we look at those two reactions, we kind of want to say of the latter one, we want to say something like, that takes real strength, or I suppose you'd be more envious of that person than you would be of the other person. person, you'd be envious off there, and you describe it as a form of strength. But if you think about what that means, you know, to be, to be strong means to sort of, you know, to carry a load that you need to sort of carry. And there's this sort of implicit understanding that there is something kind of better and not better like morally, not like we should judge them, oh, they've done a better job, but just like that is a more preferable thing to be. And like, not in the sense of, you know, preferred indifference, but like a genuinely just like better way to exist. Like if I gave you the

option after you lose a leg, you can take a pill and that pill is either going to make you super like depressed about it or you can take a different pill that will make you really motivated and get on with your life and still be happy, you take the second pill. And I guess the Stoics are saying like not only is that available like to you as an option, that is just the truth. And if you can only recognize that that's the truth, you'll be living a more flourishing life regardless of your number of limbs. Yeah, absolutely. That's a choice that we make, how we react to the things that happen to us. And that's where the kind of the power of the kind of Stoic view comes along. But the point that Seneca's making, of course, is that neither of us know how we are going to react to that extreme situation

until it happens to us. Only when it actually happens to us will our kind of strength of character truly be revealed. Yeah. And that's a kind of really terrifying sobering thought. But it's also the truth, right? It really is the truth. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a very real sense. You learn from experience. You're, you're put through trials and tests, and along the way, you kind of learn what kind of character you really have. And was it Seneca who then went on to say that you don't judge the architect by his ability to come and deliver a really interesting lecture about architecture? You don't judge the musician by his ability to stand and explain music theory to you. You judge the architect

by him building a building. He judged the musician by the performance of a piece. And similarly, you can't judge the philosopher by their ability to speak wonderfully about the sort of virtuous life, but rather to live the virtuous life and to demonstrate it when those things do happen to them. Was that also Seneca? Was that someone else? Probably appears in Seneca somewhere. He writes he writes a lot. Epictetus certainly talks about that. And another Roman Stoic who is around at this time, he was a contemporary of Seneca, he taught Epictetus, his chap called Musonius Rufus. He's kind of less well known, but well worth reading. And so I'd encourage people to kind of have a look at Musonius Rufus. And in one passage he says, if you had a choice between being treated by a doctor who was very good at giving lectures,

on medical theory or someone who had kind of experience in the field of actually, you know, stitching people back up, which would you pick to treat you? You know which one you'd pick. You'd pick the one who was expert in practice, not the one who is immediate. Even if they were, like, bad at the theory. Even if like, because it's not just that. It's like, imagine a doctor who's really good at theoretical explanation, but has a track record of really bad practice and patients dying,

versus someone who sounds completely confused about medicine when they try to talk to you. but has this perfect track record. You obviously pick the track record and with philosophy, perhaps it should be the same thing. And also annoying is that this is such a beautiful, wonderful place to wrap up and end. But I feel like I have to arc just briefly, which is so much like less satisfying a conclusion. But you mentioned earlier about how, you know, these things are in our control. We can choose how to react to the world. But just before that, you were talking about fate. And you were talking about the fact that the Stoics believe in this sort of material series of cause and effect and how the universe are turned.

recurs and occurs in the same way every time. There's always that shipwreck. If that's the case, how can I say that I can choose my outcome if everything's determined? Doesn't that remove the ability for human free will, which is kind of a requirement of the stoic response to the world? Yeah, really good question, really good, big, kind of meaty, philosophical problem. So I suppose the way in which the Stoics would describe, it's very, very difficult, isn't it? So, strictly speaking, given their determinists, the Stoics can't believe in free will in the sense that we have the ability to choose otherwise, right? Nevertheless, they're going to argue that we still nevertheless make our own choices, right? So what we choose to do right now is a choice that we make based on the current circumstances we find ourselves in. and who we are, right? And there's a sense in which, you know, the, the, the nexus of fate will work itself out and there will be one outcome from that. And there's a sense in which, there's a sense in which that is kind of predetermined,

but of course we don't know. But the important point is that we are involved in the process. So one of our sources describes this as saying that fate doesn't kind of, of do things to us, fate works through us. We are kind of one of the parties involved. I mean, you know, to give an example, I mean, you know, let's say, I don't know, let's say you encountered someone, you know, you encountered someone, I don't know, sort of attacking an animal or something like that, right? Now, you might be the sort of person who will go over and intervene and say, you know, what on earth are you doing, right? You might be someone who will shy away

because you want to avoid the confrontation. There's a sense in which which of those things you do, what you finally do is going to be determined by the sort of person that you are and the past experiences that you've had and the very specific details of that context, right? How big is the perpetrator? All of these things will kind of be involved in you making that decision. And there's a sense in which if we had all the relevant bits of information, we could kind of predict what you would do, right? If we know you're a fervent, paid up member of the RSPCA, we can be highly confident that you're going to intervene because we know who you are. And to the point that we would say, well, there's no question that he would just walk away and turn a blind eye. That's just not who he is.

He couldn't do that. Yeah. Right. So in that sense, we could say that, yeah, it's going to be determined in some sense. sense. Yeah. It sounds like a kind of compatibilityism, essentially. That's precisely the word that their kind of, you know, academics will use to

describe their view, yes. Right. Interesting. Yeah. Because that's certainly how it sounds. And I do I'm not a huge fan of compatibilism, but I do find it interesting how on this free will question, like I give the example of, you know, a firefighter running into a burning building and everyone afterwards saying like, oh, you're such a hero. Like, why did you do that? Why did you put yourself

at risk? And they say something like, I had to. I couldn't live with myself. If I didn't, I just, it's like I didn't even think I just ran in there. And on one hand, when we're doing philosophy, we want to say, there's this problem. If people don't act freely, then how can they act morally like they seem to be in conflict? And yet in a circumstance like that when someone says, I didn't even think, I just had to. I just went in there. In practice, we see that as like more virtuous.

We're like more impressed by that. I think, wow, what an incredibly moral person. And I suppose this puts the virtue in virtue ethics, right? It's not you take each individual decision and figure out what's going to maximize utility. And it's just like if you are just a virtuous person, you just will behave in particular ways. And how you behave will either be more in line with nature and the truth about the world or more out of line with nature and thereby just false. So it's just like true or false behaviours stemming necessarily from your true or false understanding of the nature of the world. Yeah, which brings us right back to character.

Yeah. And that is important. And so, yeah, we're very much in the realm of virtue ethics. Yeah, that wasn't too bad, actually, because I thought it was such a nice ending before, but that actually works quite well too. So, John Sellers, you've got lots of books, and I'll link them all down in the description. I do particularly like that sort of more academic introduction to stoicism, because it's very short and manages to sort of pack everything you need in a history of the thinkers,

an overview of the logic, physics, the ethics, as well as the sort of the inheritance of stoicism, the, forget the word you use, the reception? Reception, yeah, reputation, whatever, which we didn't really touch on quite so much. So I'll make sure that's down below. But thank you very much for your time. No, my pleasure. Thank you.