In ‘The Stoics on Conceptions and Concepts’, Katerina Ierodiakonou offers an account of the Stoics’ distinction between ennoiai and ennoēmata (‘conceptions’ and ‘concepts’), and also of the distinctions suggested by the standard Stoic terminology of concepts also mentioned above: notably, prolēpseis (‘preconceptions’), phusikai ennoiai (‘natural conceptions’), and koinai ennoiai (‘common conceptions’). All these terms appear intended to point to general notions that play a central role in the acquisition of human knowledge, but it remains puzzling how exactly the Stoics understood them or why they introduced them into their doctrine in the first place. Ierodiakonou addresses these issues, as well as further questions debated in the secondary literature. These include whether all human beings necessarily possess concepts or just have the ability to possess them, what is the content of conceptions and how it is determined, what is the ontological status of conceptions and concepts, and what are their epistemological functions.

Stoicism before Chrysippus believed in radical determism, but Chrysippus reintroduced the notion of human responsibility. He argued that it is in our power to assent to an impression or otherwise and work with it, and it is likewise in our power to assent to or to reject World Fate, working with or against it. He illustrated this with his analogy with the top that needs a spin: its spinnability is its inherent cause, but needs an external cause to activate it. In this way, he further posited, we can assign good or bad morality to humans, judging by their will to live Stoically, that is, ‘in accordance with nature’, the Stoics’ highest virtue. Virgil adopts this model in the Aeneid, so that Aeneas can be seen as learning to assent to World Fate, while Juno, Dido and Turnus can ignore or reject it. Virgil in fact incorporates Chrysippus’ analogy in a simile depicting Amata driven by her inherent desire and by the daemonic goddess Allecto to deny her assent to World Fate. However, he locates deviations from World Fate within the Stoic category of ‘events in suspension’, ‘indifferents’ or individual fortunes, which might temporarily challenge World Fate but never negate it.

Chapter 1 starts by tracing the archaeology of carpe diem. Rather than speculating about the origin of a motif that is already attested in Akkadian and Egyptian sources, this chapter looks at the Greeks’ own discourse of the past and how they constructed the origins of the motif. The focus of the chapter is the hedonistic epitaph of the legendary last king of Assyria, Sardanapallus. Greeks were fascinated with this foreign carpe diem text which seemed to precede their own history. In fact, however, it was by misunderstanding this foreign monument that they recreated its text; lurking behind Sardanapallus’ Assyrian orgy are Greek banquets and the present tense of performative Greek lyric. The chapter shows that the Sardanapallus epitaph allows for fascinating insights into Greek ways of reading epigrams. As the chapter discusses the reception of the Sardanapallus epitaph in authors such as Callimachus, Crates, Chrysippus, Alexis, and Rabirius, it shows how one of Epicurus’ detractors forges a false link between Epicurus and carpe diem, when he changes one word of the epitaph.

This chapter studies the intersection of biology and cosmology from the angle of the thesis that the cosmos is intelligent in the sense that it is an agent capable of thinking, which is part of their more general thesis that the cosmos is an animal. The thesis that the cosmos is intelligent is argued for by the Stoics through different families of proofs.The present chapter focusses on one of them, called ‘F1’,and its relation to the proof of the intelligence of the cosmos in Plato, Tim. 30a2–c1. The argument-structure common to the members of F1 is (a) the intelligent is better than the unintelligent but (b) the cosmos is better than everything else; therefore, (c) the cosmos is intelligent. I argue that this argument-structure is borrowed from the Timaean proof but that, in contrast with the Timaean proof, F1 is based on a teleological theory that I call ‘cosmocentrism’, according to which the cosmos is a beneficiary, and the ultimate beneficiary, of everything that exists within it. Plato accepted cosmocentrism, but he did not use it to argue for the intelligence of the cosmos. This family, therefore, introduces a major innovation in ancient cosmological thinking.

This chapter is about the achievement of immortality in contexts where an everlasting future for the subject is not envisaged. I start with Aristotle’s advice in the Nicomachean Ethics to ‘act as an immortal’ and argue that the talk of immortality does not derive from Aristotle’s own theories about the soul and intellect but rather should be understood with reference to the immediate dialectical context. I then relate Epicurean and Stoic discussions of immortality and ‘imperishability’ to the relevant parts of their theology. The early Epicurean tradition mentions ‘immortal goods’ that can be attained by human beings and are enough to make human beings, in the relevant ethical respect, godlike. Epicureanism contains more than one conception of these ‘goods’, although they should never be identified with either immortality or imperishability. In Stoicism the attribution of mortality and immortality is controlled by strict adherence to a Platonic definition of death (the separation of soul from body) – stricter adherence than we find in the Phaedo itself.

This chapter examines Calcidius' position vis-à-vis and use of Stoicism, focusing on the themes of Providence and fate, the human soul, and matter, and argues that the Stoic influence is much stronger than commonly assumed, despite an overt polemic.

This chapter argues that Providence is one of the key themes of the commentary, and examines how Calcidius (1) harmonizes Providence and fate with human free will through a notion of hypothetical necessity; and (2) refutes determinist positions, among which the Stoic view.

In Book 1 of On divination, Cicero’s brother Quintus, who is not a Stoic, presents the Stoic case that all the many forms of divination at Rome are channels of divine communication. He does so explicitly in response to the arguments of On the nature of the gods, to strengthen the case that the gods care for us. I argue that his speech, which scholars have often called confused, can be better understood once we see it as a continuation of On the nature of the gods. For he speaks about not the, or even one, Stoic defence of divination, but rather two different Stoic views. The first is the view of Chrysippus, according to which divination was an art of interpreting messages from the gods. This view was challenged by the skeptic Carneades, and Cotta reissued some of this challenge in On the nature of the gods. Quintus recruits a new view in answer to this challenge, according to which some divination (e.g. augury, haruspicy, astrology) is artificial in that its divination meaning is first discovered by an art, but some is natural, in that some dreams and oracles have divinatory meaning without the use of an art.

The Sorites Paradox has a very long history, though one less rich than that of its close relative, the Liar. This chapter is divided into three sections. Section 1 presents a very brief and schematic overview of the pre-analytic history of the Sorites Paradox, from the Ancient Greeks to Kant and Hegel. Section 2 focuses on Chrysippus (Stoic from the third century BC), the ancient philosopher who worked most on the Sorites. Chrysippus held an epistemic view of vagueness and proposed a strategy to respond to the paradox in the context of a dialectical questioning (similar to what is now commonly called the Forced March) that deserves to be thoroughly examined. Section 3 focuses on Leibniz, who produced, in the author's view, the most interesting contribution in modern pre-analytic times on the paradox. Leibniz started by accepting that vague notions have sharp boundaries, but then changed his mind and moved to something like a semantic view of vagueness.