The Stoic notion of sense

A brief essay about the Stoic logic in the Logic of sense by Deleuze

Abstract

Stoicism is rooted on the treble ground of physics, logic and ethics. Even though, undoubtfully, Stoics focused mainly on the latter throughout the movement's hindmost Roman phase – whilst its prior, Hellenistic tradition is rather thought of as an art of living –, understanding all three above-mentioned disciplines as an organic whole is paramount so as to faithfully retrieve the school's cosmology and general philosophy. Now, Stoic ontology is altogether materialist and monist – according to its core tenets, there are but bodies, which mutual exchanges, somehow, happen to spawn the so-called incorporeals, that is, time, place, void, and sayables. These ones (lekta) pertain to the linguistic depiction of material phenomena, and, as such, they take on the necessarily dialogical, expressive relation to reality, as well as they constitute a condition of possibility for accessing truth. All in all, they stand for a translation of something non-dialogical into a speech. If this article wishes to outline the propositionnal relations analyzed by Stoic logic, it does so, mainly, with the aim of enlightening the question of sense, in Deleuze's words its "aliquid", which refers to the non-existent entity that subsists through the proposition; or to the attribute, as per modern analytic logic.