The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 92 potx

i.e. a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.’ 2. After certain initial moves Spinoza proves propos- ition 5, ‘In the universe there cannot be two or more sub- stances of the same nature or attribute’, by considering what could possibly distinguish two such substances. It could not be their affections or modes, because they must be different in order to have different affections (just as two men could not be distinguished by the fact that one was angry and the other not, for this possibility rests upon their being different men—compare some recent argu- ments for bare particulars). However, on the only alterna- tive, that they are distinguished by their natures or attributes, they would not be instances of what is denied. Why Spinoza did not consider the apparently obvious objection (noted by Leibniz) that they might share one but not all their attributes has been debated. The solution rec- ommended here is that, since an attribute is simply a way of conceiving the essence or nature of a substance, any shared attribute implies a shared essence which in turn implies the same set of attributes as ways of conceiving it. 3. The next crucial proposition (part 1, proposition 11) affirms the necessary existence of God as we have seen him (or it—to say ‘her’ would be wildly anachronistic) defined. Spinoza’s *ontological argument for this is derived with peculiar abruptness from proposition 7, according to which existence appertains to the nature of substance (and so must pertain to the divine substance), this being derived in turn from the impossibility, estab- lished in previous propositions, of one substance producing another (because such causation requires a community of nature that is impossible granted that two substances cannot share their nature). One might think that this only shows that if a substance exists at all, then it must exist of its own nature, and does not tell us which if any substances do exist. However, the underlying thought seems to be that any coherently con- ceivable substance (with a possibly actualizable essence) must exist, since the conception of it cannot be derived from anything but its own existing self. In the case of that which could only exist as the modification of something else, the case is different, for the conception of it may be derived from the conception of that of which it is a pos- sible modification. Thus (my examples) the conception of Horatio’s bravery in some non-actual situation may be derived from a proper conception of Horatio himself, and the conception of a unicorn may be derived from the con- ception of the universal space within which it could figure as a possible form. But in the case of a coherently conceiv- able substance, such as God, there can be no such deriv- ation, and its coherent conceivability must derive from its own actual being. (Leibniz’s claim that the ontological argument should first establish the coherent conceivabil- ity of God is apt here. In fact in the course of the first of two further proofs Spinoza does try to show this.) 4. Since a perfect substance exists possessing all attrib- utes, and since there cannot be more than one substance possessing the same attribute, it follows that this perfect substance is the only substance, since there are no attrib- utes left for any other substance. Thus (part 1, proposition 14) ‘Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.’ We must continue in even less detail. All ordinary finite things are modes of this one substance, that is, stand to it as, say, an emotion pertains to a person or a movement to a moving thing. Thus the existence of a person consists in the one substance being in a certain state, just as the exist- ence of my anger consists in my being in a certain state. (This traditional reading of Spinoza is sometimes chal- lenged.) In effect, my anger is the mode (Spinoza says ‘affection’) of a mode. Some commentators resist the usual idea that for Spin- oza God simply is the universe, insisting that he is rather the one substance in which all natural phenomena inhere. But though we should distinguish between the essence- and-attributes-of-God and his modes, that still leaves all natural phenomena as his states just as my moods are mine. However, certainly God is not merely the physical universe for Spinoza. (Though that God was, among other things, physical, was, indeed, one of his most shock- ing claims.) For the essence of God is expressed in an infin- ite number of attributes of which physical extension is just one. Thus the physical world is God’s body, God in his physical aspect, rather than the totality of what God is. Humans, as it happens, only know of one other of these attributes, namely thought. God or the universe is thus both an infinite physical thing and an infinite thinking thing (as well as an infinite number of other infinite things the nature of which is hidden from us). The one substance and its modes exhaust the things which are. But where does that leave the essence and attributes of the one substance and the essences-of-its- modes (of which Spinoza also makes much)? On the face of it, these seem additional sorts of entity. However, this is not really so. (i) The essence of a finite thing (that is, a finite mode) is simply the thing itself (or rather that core thereof which must endure so long as the thing exists at all) qua possibil- ity whose actualization constitutes it an existent or whose non-actualization leaves it merely as something which might exist (so far at least as the general character of the universe goes). The essence of the one substance is simi- larly one with the substance itself, that core of the universe which must endure so long as anything does and of which all finite things are passing states. However, there is no question of its ever having or having had status as a mere possibility and it is a necessarily actualized essence. That something is possible but non-existent must be a fact about something which does exist. The non-existence of unicorns is the fact that nature has no place for them, but there is nothing which could have no place for Nature, that is, the one divine substance. There is an implied fur- ther proof of God’s existence here. (ii) Much discussion has centred on how Spinoza con- ceived the relation between the essence of the one sub- stance and its attributes. The ‘subjective’ interpretation 890 Spinoza, Baruch regards them as the subjective appearances to a mind of some unknown ultimate noumenal essence. Modern com- mentators mostly prefer the objective interpretation according to which they are genuine constituents of the essence rather than a veil behind which it hides. There are difficulties in both accounts, both as interpretation and as philosophy. This writer holds the intermediate position that each attribute is one of various alternative ways of con- ceiving the essence correctly. (Among other reasons for this are the justification we have seen that it provides of part 1, proposition 5.) Thus the world can be truly seen either as a physical system (the attribute of extension) or as a mental system, that is, a system of ideas (the attribute of thought) while there are other in principle possible ways of seeing it (the unknown attributes) beyond human mental capacity. In short, neither the essence of substance nor its attrib- utes are items in addition to substance itself. Qua system of thought God, or Nature, is the idea of itself qua physical system, and every finite thing, as mode of the one substance, is both a physical thing and the idea of that physical thing, that is, that component of God’s mind which is his awareness of it. Thus every genuine unit in physical nature, animal, plant, or ultimate particle, has its mental counterpart, that is, may be conceived not as a physical thing but as the idea of a physical thing. The human mind is the idea of the human body (of how it functions as a whole, rather than of its every detail). Here again commentators interpret Spinoza somewhat divergently, but most agree that this implies that every physical thing has some kind of sentience. However, it is only in so far as a physical thing has a certain wholeness to it that its mental counterpart constitutes a mind with much distinctness from the rest of cosmic mentality. Every finite thing has a built in conatus (striving or endeavour) to persist in its own being, that is, to keep its own essence actualized (in fact, the conatus simply is the essence with its own tendency to persist) until it is defeated in so doing by external causes. This produces self- preserving behaviour suited, to the extent that it can inter- nally register them, to current circumstances. The human mind–body is especially apt in such registration, which constitutes its own ideas of its current environment. (Its ideas of its environment are part of God’s current idea of it as affected by this.) Pleasure and pain are the mental ana- logues of an increase or decrease in the effectiveness of its conatus, differing in character with the thing’s essence. Spinoza defines all the emotions in terms of pleasure, pain, and the basic conatus they manifest. He aims to study human psychology dispassionately ‘just as if it were an investigation into lines, planes, or bodies’, in contrast to those ‘who prefer to abuse or deride the emotions and actions of men rather than to understand them’. For only by understanding ourselves can we win freedom in Spinoza’s sense. Spinoza is an uncompromising determinist. Everything that happens is determined by two factors, in the manner of Hempel’s account of scientific explanation, the standing nature of God, that is, the laws of nature, and previous conditions likewise determined back through infinite time. There is no human ‘freedom of indifference’ but there are various degrees of human freedom in a more worthy sense. The physical and mental behaviour of a human being (or, in principle, of any other finite thing) may be active or passive to various degrees. The more it stems distinctively (or creatively) from its own conatus, the more active it is; the more it is merely acted on by external things, the more passive it is. The active behaviour of the mind consists in what Spinoza calls adequate ideas, the passive behaviour in inadequate ideas; adequate ideas necessarily constitute more genuine knowledge. Know- ledge has three main grades, in order of its adequacy: (1) knowledge by hearsay and vague experience; (2) know- ledge by general reasoning; (3) intuitive rational insight. The first type of knowledge yields emotion and activity of an essentially enslaved sort; human liberation consists in movement through the second to the third type of know- ledge. Only at that level do we cease to be victims of emo- tions which we do not properly understand and cannot control. The third type of knowledge ultimately yields the ‘intellectual love of God’, Spinoza’s version of salvation. More informally put, Spinoza regards us in bondage so far as we are under the control of external things (in a sense which includes especially mental processes of our own which we do not properly understand) and as free to the extent that we meet life with creative understanding of what will best serve the purposes that adequate ideas will determine in us. One may still wonder how far Spinoza is really com- mitted to what one might call a religious view of the world. Well, he was certainly against all forms of religion which he regarded as life-denying and which view the present life as a mere preparation for a life to come; rather, our primary aim should be joyous living in the here and now. This, however, should ideally culminate in that quasi-mystical grasp of our eternal place in the scheme of things, and oneness with God, or nature, which he calls the intellectual love of God. Love of God, in this sense, should be the focal aim of the wise man’s life. So far as religion, as most people conceive it, goes, he clearly thought that a good deal of it was mere superstition, fomenting intolerance and in many ways unhelpful as a basis for a genuinely good life. But he also thought that for the mass of people, who are incapable of the philosopher’s intellectual love of God, a good popular religion could act as a morally worthy substitute, providing a less complete form of salvation available to all who live morally and love God, as they conceive him, appropriately, provided only that their love of God is of a type which promotes obedi- ence to the basic commands of morality. Spinoza is arguably the only really great ‘modern’ Western philosopher who develops what can be properly called a personal *philosophy of life. t.l.s.s. *determinism; freedom. Spinoza, Baruch 891 translations Baruch Spinoza: The Ethics and Selected Letters, tr. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, 1982). The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and tr. Edwin Curley (Prince- ton, NJ, 1985). Spinoza: Ethics, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London, 1989). Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, tr. Samuel Shirley (Leiden, 1991). commentaries Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge, 1984). Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spin- oza’s Ethics (Princeton, NJ, 1988). —— Spinoza’s Metaphysics: A Study in Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). Alan Donagan, Spinoza (Brighton, 1988). D. Garrett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (Cambridge, 1996). Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza (Harmondsworth, 1951). Errol Harris, Salvation from Despair: A Reappraisal of Spinoza’s Phil- osophy (The Hague, 1973). S. Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999). G. H. R. Parkinson, Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge(Oxford, 1953). T. L. S. Sprigge, Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth, 1984), ch. 8. collections E. Freeman and M. Mandelbaum, Spinoza: Essays in Interpretation (La Salle, Ill., 1975). Marjorie Grene (ed.), Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York, 1985). S. P. Kashap (ed.), Studies in Spinoza: Critical and Interpretive Essays (Berkeley, Calif., 1972). spirit. Spirits hover between *minds, *souls, and vapours. The original idea of a spirit is of a disembodied agent, as an immaterial soul or a non-material intelligent power. In the seventeenth century and earlier there was a belief in spirits as gaslike substances intermediate between matter and mind. For all his dualism Descartes in Les Passions de l’âme uses the idea. When we talk now of the spiritual we refer to neither of these but typically to the kind of emo- tion one might have towards God or some other factor beyond one’s material life. An image common to all three of these seems to be one of distillation, of a more refined product of a crude original. a.m. *pneuma. Richard Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). spontaneity and indifference. These medieval terms are used for two kinds of liberty or freedom. The two kinds continue to be discussed, under the names ‘voluntariness’ and ‘origination’, the first sometimes being denied to be real liberty or freedom. To have liberty of spontaneity is to be able to do as you choose. That is, unlike a man in jail, or a man with a gun at his head, you are unconstrained or uncompelled to act as you do. To have liberty of indiffer- ence is to be able, given things exactly as they are, to choose or originate another action different from the one you actually choose. If determinism is true, we still often enjoy liberty of spontaneity, because our actions still result from our own choices, but not liberty of indiffer- ence, because the choices themselves are caused or deter- mined. According to the doctrine of *compatibilism, spontaneity is the freedom that is important, and is suffi- cient for moral responsibility. According to incompatibil- ism, the only true freedom is indifference, and it is necessary for moral responsibility. r.c.w. *freedom and determinism; origination; embraced and reluctant desires. A. Kenny, ‘Freedom, Spontaneity, and Indifference’, in T. Hon- derich (ed.), Essays on Freedom of Action (London, 1973). sport. Despite Plato’s reputation as a wrestler, the worlds of philosophy and sport have rarely collided. Unlike other social practices such as art, education, or medicine, sport’s characteristic conceptualization as ‘non-serious’ rein- forces scepticism as to the possibility of genuine philo- sophical interest therein. As a professional field of some thirty years, philosophy of sport has analysed key concepts such as ‘competition’, ‘game’, ‘play’, and ‘sport’, and explored more generally their nature and significance. As a field of applied philosophy, it has often drawn from work in other fields such as aesthetics, epistemology, and the philosophy of rules. Only in ethics does sport give rise to issues of substantial and original interest, where research might contribute to new thinking in the parent discipline. Sports ethics is certainly the most vibrant dimension of the philosophy of sport, where analytical and normative issues surrounding practices such as doping, cheating, gamesmanship, and genetic manipulation are widely dis- puted, though largely from within a deontological framework. d.m cn. M. McNamee and S. J. Parry (eds.), Ethics and Sport (London, 1998). W. P. Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport: A Critique and Reconstruc- tion (Chicago, 1994). Sprigge, Timothy L. S. (1932– ). British idealist philoso- pher, formerly at the University of Edinburgh. In The Vin- dication of Absolute Idealism (1983) he argues that the reality which appears to us as the physical world of daily life, and of which physical science specifies the abstract structure, is ‘in itself’ (or ‘noumenally’) a system of mutually inter- acting centres of experience. Thus he defends a form of *panpsychism. This conclusion is supported by an argu- ment that a totally unexperienced reality is impossible. Reflections on relations and on temporality suggest that the system must have its own overall consciousness, as an eternal changeless unity within which temporal processes occur. This position is Spinozistic in that the universe is held to be both a mental and a physical totality, though on Sprigge’s view the mental is its inner essence and the phys- ical only its structure. In his moral philosophy Sprigge defends a qualified moral realism and utilitarianism which is not only consist- ent with his metaphysics but depends upon it for premisses. It is entailed by his moral philosophy that non- human animals have rights, and Sprigge is known as a defender of *animal rights through both publications and active campaigning. s.p. 892 Spinoza, Baruch *idealism; Spinoza; Santayana. T. L. S. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh, 1983). —— The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London, 1988). —— James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (Lon- don, 1993). square of opposition. Traditionally ‘All men are mortal’ and ‘No men are mortal’ are *contraries, meaning that they cannot both be true but may both be false; and ‘Some men are mortal’ and ‘Some men are not mortal’ are *sub- contraries, meaning that they cannot both be false but may both be true. ‘All men are mortal’ and ‘Some men are not mortal’ (like ‘No men are mortal’ and ‘Some men are mortal’) are *contradictories, meaning that one must be true, the other false. The square is a traditional diagram summarizing these ‘oppositions’: All men are mortal Some men are mortal ↑↑ contraries contradictories subcontraries ↓↓ No men are mortal Some men are not mortal In traditional logic ‘Some men are mortal’ is entailed by ‘All men are mortal’, and ‘Some men are not mortal’ is entailed by ‘No men are mortal’. Though it is implausible to regard this subalternation as a variety of opposition, it was sometimes included in the diagram too. c.w. *traditional logic; subaltern. C. Williamson, ‘Squares of Opposition’, Notre Dame Journal of For- mal Logic (1972). stadium or moving rows paradox. The most mysterious of *Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes of motion. The rows are like trains of coaches; the train of A-coaches is stationary, those of B-coaches and C-coaches are moving past it at equal speeds in opposite directions. Zeno seems to infer that a B takes as long, and also half as long, to pass a moving C as to pass a stationary A; hence that a time is equal to its half. One suggestion is that he is attacking the idea of a min- imum time-stretch: a B’s A-passing time is supposed for argument’s sake to be such a minimum; but if so, even though two C-passing times evidently equal that min- imum, one C-passing time cannot be less. Another sugges- tion has him ignore the relativity of motion: since the coaches are equal in length, it must take the same time for a B to pass one A as to pass one C. c.a.k. W. C. Salmon (ed.), Zeno’s Paradoxes (Indianapolis, 1970). Stalnaker, Robert C. (1940– ). American philosopher who is especially noted for his work on *conditionals. Like David Lewis, but independently of him, Stalnaker has devised an analysis of conditionals in terms of *possible worlds. Loosely, Stalnaker regards a conditional of the form ‘If p, then q’ as being true in the actual world if and only if q is true in the closest possible world in which p is true. There are important differences between Stalnaker’s and Lewis’s systems of conditional logic, the most notable being that only Stalnaker’s supports the principle of condi- tional *excluded middle, that is, the principle that ‘Either if p, then q, or if p, then not q’ is true of *logical necessity. Apparent counter-examples can be deflected by denying that the principle of bivalence holds for conditionals. Stalnaker has also done influential work on the onto- logical status of possible worlds, the theory of mental con- tent, the nature of belief, and the problem of how beliefs undergo rational revision. e.j.l. R. C. Stalnaker, Inquiry (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). —— Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and Thought (Oxford, 1999). —— Ways a World Might Be: Metaphysical and Anti-Metaphysical Essays (Oxford, 2003). State, the. The political organization of a body of people for the maintenance of order within its territory by coer- cion, or, more loosely, the body of people so organized or its territory. There have been stateless societies, character- ized by lack of a definite territory or, perhaps, by the absence of a form of government with coercive powers for securing obedience. The State, however, is taken to have the *power to regulate the behaviour of all individ- uals and of any other organizations within its boundaries. For this purpose the State has, or at least claims, a monop- oly on the use of force. Among several theories of the nature of the State the simplest holds that it is simply an organization for subor- dinating the many to the will of a dominant few. But even on this account a distinction has to be drawn between the private acts of individuals and their public acts as agents of the State. This is done through marking out the latter as the exercise of power through the administration of the law and the maintenance of security for a territory within which the law can be administered. But is the State more than simply ‘a conspiracy of the rich who call their intrigues laws’ (Sir Thomas More)? *Anarchism denies that it is, holding that the State lacks any necessary or desirable function in regulating society. Other theories characterize the State in terms of one. According to Hobbes it prevents a ‘warre of every man against every man’, and is legitimized by a *social contract between citizens to submit to it in order to secure this benefit. This leads naturally to a view of the State as a voluntary association for mutual protection. Under the theory of *democracy such an association will be governed legitimately only if in accordance with the electorally expressed wishes of its members. In democracies decisions may be made which appar- ently involve the State in going beyond its role of main- taining social order. Is this admissible? Under *conservatism, the State’s provision of welfare or even its redistribution of wealth can be viewed as simply averting strife, or otherwise as inadmissible. This reflects the doctrine of the ‘minimal’ State. The State’s prevention of discord may, however, be viewed as only an example of its general provision of public benefits. Thus according to *socialism the task of the State is the creation of a State, the 893 ← ← ← ← good life for all, towards which radical social policies are permissible. All the above theories view the State as conducing to the satisfaction of individual wishes, which are logically prior to it. Under some forms of *communitarianism, however, the State is itself the condition of any rational choice. Thus ‘the Fascist conception of the State is all- embracing: outside it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value’ (Mussolini). *Fascism legit- imizes the State by according it the role of supreme moral arbiter. The theory of the State as an association and some the- ories of nationalism have different approaches to the ques- tion which territory should make up the State. For example, the former should be sympathetic to well- supported secessionist movements, while the latter may regard them as a threat to national unity. However, although the rights of a State to self-preservation against internal threats are unclear, their right and duty to defend themselves against external ones is readily conceded. Indeed, in the absence of international government, Hobbes viewed the relation between States as one of perpetual war. p.g. Kenneth Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe (Oxford, 1980). Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1974). statements, basic: see basic statements. statements and sentences. Most modern logicians main- tain that statements are distinct from sentences, citing the fact that not all sentences are used to make statements or arguing that the same statement may be expressed by dif- ferent sentences. Some use ‘statement’ and *‘proposition’ interchangeably, regarding them as alternative names for what is ‘expressed’ by an indicative sentence or ‘asserted’ when such a sentence is used. Others distinguish between the two, so that a proposition is what is asserted when such a sentence is used to make a statement. Some— Strawson, for example—have held that statements must be distinguished from sentences because mere sentences cannot contradict one another. We imagine that ‘I am under six foot tall’ and ‘I am over six foot tall’ are inconsis- tent, the argument runs, only because we think of them being uttered by the same person in the same breath, i.e. being used to make contradictory statements. What this argument really shows, however, is the importance of tak- ing context into account. Adding the sentence–statement distinction is arbitrary, but it reflects a deep-seated ten- dency to incorporate in a separate entity what properly belongs to the way that a sentence is used in some particu- lar setting. c.w. P. F. Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory (London, 1952), 3–4, 9–12, 174–6. state of nature. This notion was employed by *social contract theorists to indicate the condition of human beings prior to or without government. By showing what was lacking in this natural condition, or state of nature, they hoped to demonstrate the benefits of politically organ- ized society and the rationality of accepting governmental authority. The state of nature was characterized by certain deficiencies for which government was said to be the proper remedy. It is therefore rational for individuals to pull themselves out of this condition by agreeing among themselves to accept some form of political authority. However, social contract theorists differed sharply with one another about what kind of government provides the best remedy, and this disagreement stems largely from how each characterizes the state of nature. Hobbes, for example, characterized it as an utterly lawless state of affairs in which ‘the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice . . . have no place’, and where each man has the right (or liberty) to do whatever he deems necessary to preserve himself. Such a condition, he says, is ‘called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man’. He observes that under such circumstances ‘the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Thus, Hobbes concludes that the only kind of political authority strong and stable enough to safeguard us from ever falling into such a horrible condition again is unlimited political authority, preferably an absolute monarchy. The author- ity of such a sovereign must be unconditional and indis- soluble; the right to rule conferred on the sovereign must be such that ‘whatsoever he doth, it can be no injury to any of his subjects, nor ought he to be by any of them accused of injustice’. Locke, on the other hand, characterized the state of nature as a pre-political state, but insists that ‘the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions’. Because of this he views the state of nature as merely involving certain inconve- niences. These inconveniences consist in (1) the lack of an established, known law that gives an authoritative inter- pretation of the law of nature, (2) the absence of an impar- tial judge to determine violations of the law and their proper punishment, and (3) the want of a power sufficient to ensure enforcement of the law. Thus, while granting that ‘civil government is the proper remedy for the incon- veniences of the state of nature’, Locke also admonishes us ‘to remember that absolute monarchs are but men’ and asks, ‘if government is to be the remedy of those evils which necessarily follow from men’s being judges in their own cases, and the state of nature is therefore not to be endured, I desire to know what kind of government that is, and how much better it is than the state of nature, where one man commanding a multitude, has the liberty to be judge in his own case, and may do to all his subjects whatever he pleases . . . and in whatsoever he does, whether led by reason, mistake, or passion, must be sub- mitted to’. Locke concludes that the proper remedy for the state of nature must place ultimate political authority in the will of the majority, who will then entrust political power to governmental officials only under the condition 894 State, the that the latter promote the common good, reserving the right to remove them if they violate this trust. r.d.m. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), Second Treatise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762). Stevenson, Charles L. (1908–79). Stevenson is the best known, and arguably the most compelling, exponent of what is known as the *emotive theory of ethics. In two papers written in the 1930s (‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms’ (1937), ‘Persuasive Definitions’ (1938), col- lected in his Facts and Values (New Haven, Conn., 1963)) Stevenson presented this theory, that moral judgements do not describe properties of people or actions but express approval or disapproval and seek also to influence the feel- ings of approval and disapproval of others. He worked out his ideas in detail in Ethics and Language (New Haven, Conn., 1944), a substantial work of considerable depth and originality. The emotive theory of ethics is sometimes taken to encourage, or to imply, immorality, and because of this (wholly unwarranted) idea Stevenson was dis- charged from a university post in 1945. However, he sub- sequently worked at the University of Michigan until his retirement in 1977. He is certainly one of the most influ- ential ethical theorists of this century, for all that the emo- tive theory continues to be widely criticized. n.j.h.d. Stewart, Dugald (1735–1828). Son of a professor of math- ematics in Edinburgh, for whom he deputized, and pupil of Ferguson, he heard Reid lecturing in Glasgow and was persuaded that mind can be studied scientifically. Clarify- ing Reid’s principles of common sense, he saw the differ- ence between the axiomatic deduction of mathematics and natural generation of belief about the world. Such existential belief had to be governed by laws, not operat- ing as deductive premisses but as constituents of human reason. As Ferguson’s successor to the Chair of Moral Phil- osophy, Stewart argued, as had Reid, that moral qualities really exist independently of perception. He proclaimed his philosophy in extensive writings, promoting Adam Smith’s science of legislation, or political economy, which he believed to presuppose moral philosophy. He foresaw that British liberty would develop among ‘the oppressed and benighted nations around us’. Although James Mill was one of his students, M’Cosh applauded him for saving England from ‘low sensational, materialistic, and utilitar- ian views’. v.h. *Scottish philosophy. K. Haakonssen, ‘From Moral Philosophy to Political Economy: The Contribution of Dugald Stewart’, in V. Hope (ed.), Philoso- phers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1984). D. Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (London, 1843). —— Outlines of Moral Philosophy, with a memoir by J. M‘Cosh (London, 1864). Stich, Stephen (1944– ). American philosopher. Stich’s work in philosophy of psychology and theory of know- ledge uses results from cognitive psychology to question the view—called *‘folk psychology’—that intentional behaviour is to be explained by appeal to the agent’s beliefs and desires (where beliefs and desires are construed as attitudes toward propositions) along with traditional accounts of what it is for a method of inquiry to be rational. Cognitive psychological evidence has suggested to Stich that people often do not act in ways that fit what they sincerely claim they believe or desire, and therefore that there may be no such things as beliefs or desires whose contents can be determined as required by folk psychology explanations of behaviour. Further evidence that people often make up their minds in violation of stand- ards of rationality derived from elementary logic and probability theory has led Stich to a radical critique of the notion of rational belief and the goals of inquiry. j.b.b. Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). —— Deconstructing the Mind (New York, 1996). Stirner, Max (1806–56), pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt. German philosopher who heard Hegel lecture and became a Left Hegelian. In his major work, The Ego and his Own (1845), he attacks the ‘new radicalism’ of Bauer, Feuerbach, and Marx as much as the ‘old orthodoxy’. The only reality, he argues, is the individual ego, and things have value only in so far as they serve the ego. The individual must become conscious of his power over his own ideas. Once ideas escape the ego’s control, they become ‘ideals’ and dominate the ego that produced them. This is true not only of the old ideas of Church and State, but of the new ideas of humanism and socialism. This, like Bauer’s, exalt- ation of individual self-consciousness is a reversion to pre- Hegelian romanticism. Marx and Engels attacked ‘Saint Max’ (Stirner) in The German Ideology. m.j.i. *romanticism, philosophical. R. W. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (Oxford, 1971). stochastic process. Any sequence of trials the outcomes of which are only probabilistically determined. The term is usually applied to sequences of trials ordered in time. As an example consider a time-ordered sequence of tosses of a fair die with specified probabilities for any given face coming up in a given toss. Two fundamentally important kinds of sto- chastic processes are Bernoulli sequences, in which the trials are all probabilistically independent of one another, and Markov processes. In a Markov process the probabil- ities for the outcome of a trial may depend conditionally on the outcome of the previous trial, but they are probabilist- ically independent of the outcomes of any trials before the one immediately preceding the trial in question. l.s. *chance; probability. W. Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications (New York, 1950), vol. i, ch. 15. Stoicism. Philosophical tradition founded by Zeno of Citium, developed by Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and Stoicism 895 named from the Stoa poikile¯ or ‘Painted Porch’ in Athens where they taught. The last major figure in antiquity to have Stoicism as his primary allegiance was the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century ad, but the influ- ence of the school’s ideas lived on, and ‘stoical’ has become a common expression to indicate acceptance of misfortune without complaint. Stoicism placed ethics in the context of an understand- ing of the world as a whole, with reason being paramount both in human behaviour and in the divinely ordered cos- mos. The Stoic view of divinity and its relation to the world has been historically influential, contributing to the context in which *Neoplatonic and Christian thought developed, and especially to *theodicy; but it is perhaps Stoic ethical views that are of most immediate philosoph- ical interest to us today, and it is these that have been given most prominence in what follows. The systematic nature of Stoic philosophy indeed reflected the school’s view of the systematic nature of the world itself, which it sought to explain without recourse to a Platonic other-worldliness. Some of the paradoxes for which Stoicism was notorious were deliberately adopted for the sake of a striking expos- ition; but the system was ultimately unable to succeed in explaining everything without internal incoherences. Stoic ethics indicated that if a perfectly wise, i.e. virtu- ous, man saw his child in danger of drowning (say), he would try to save it; but that if he failed he would accept this without feeling distress or pity, and without his happi- ness being diminished. Since everything that happens is governed by divine providence, his failure must have been for the best, even if he could not understand why. More- over, moral virtue is the only good, and wickedness the only evil; so the child’s death was not itself an evil. Fur- thermore, since moral virtue is the only good, and being perfectly virtuous the wise man will by definition have done the best he could, there is nothing for him to regret. (This example is adapted from Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, 197–8; it is not based on any single ancient text, but brings out the implications.) Such a view may seem repellent, even incomprehen- sible, especially as the Stoics made ‘following *nature’ the centre of their ethics, explaining the development of moral awareness by the individual’s progressive realiza- tion of what was naturally appropriate for him (oikeio¯sis). But context and motivation are important. Ancient Greek society placed considerable emphasis on material achieve- ment, and in spite of Socrates’ insistence on the import- ance of moral goodness, Aristotle had maintained the relevance of bodily and material goods, as well as virtue, to human happiness (*eudaimonia); indeed some Aris- totelian virtues require considerable resources and social standing. The Stoics reacted against such views, still within a eudaemonistic framework, by insisting that all that matters is our attempts to do what is right; health and wealth are naturally preferable to sickness and poverty, and we should pursue them if we do not wrong others thereby, but achieving them is beyond our control. A slave, as Epictetus had been, can be as virtuous as a free man. Stoicism did not teach withdrawal and inaction (the Stoic school, unlike others, was in the Athenian city centre); but the wise man, while doing the best he can in the circum- stances as he sees them, is prepared to accept the eventual outcome as the will of providence, and thus he alone is free. He is like an archer who cares less about actually hit- ting the target than about doing the best he can to hit it, and his wisdom includes understanding the difference between what is in his power and what is not. (That Chrysippus was a thoroughgoing compatibilist, holding that our actions are predetermined but still our responsi- bility, is a separate issue; what is important—from his point of view—is that the actions are still ours.) Only the perfectly wise man is good—and he is as rare as the phoenix; all others are both mad and bad, and all crimes are equal. Like the insistence that virtue alone is good, this can be seen as straining language to make a serious point; all imperfection is imperfection, and one can drown an arm’s length from the surface as well as 500 fathoms down. The paradox was lessened by recognition of a class of those not yet virtuous but ‘making progress’. The actions which such people should perform are ‘proper’ (kathe¯konta, often rendered ‘duties’); it is only when such actions are per- formed by the wise man that they count as virtuous. *Emo- tions are interpreted in intellectual terms; those such as distress, pity (which is a species of distress), and fear, which reflect a false judgement about what is evil, are to be avoided (as also are those which reflect a false judgement about what is good, such as love of honours or riches). It is for such emotions as these that the Stoics reserved the usual Greek term pathe¯. They did, however, allow the wise man such ‘good feelings’ as ‘watchfulness’ or kindness, the dif- ference being that these are based on sound (Stoic) reason- ing concerning what matters and what does not. The wise man will thus be apathe¯s, ‘without pathe¯’, but not in our terms ‘apathetic’. The experience of internal conflict which Plato had interpreted as a struggle between rational and irrational parts of our psyche was for the early Stoa rather a rapid wavering between conflicting judgements. By taking nature as a moral guide (like their Cynic pre- decessors, for whom, however, ‘following nature’ meant little more than rejecting the institutions of the city state), the Stoics founded the tradition of *natural law. In the Roman period Stoicism became linked with the senatorial opposition to the autocratic rule of emperors like Nero and Domitian. The Stoics were pantheists; *God not only orders everything for the best, but is present in everything as *‘spirit’, conceived in corporeal terms (as fiery air), because only what is corporeal exists, and determining the character of each thing by its degree of physical ‘tension’. In animate beings spirit is present as psyche, in plants as ‘nature’, and in inanimate things as their ‘state’ (hexis). But God exists in a special way in the fiery heavens, and at fixed periods the whole world becomes fire (an apotheosis, rather than a destruction) before again repeating its prede- termined history. The Stoics developed *propositional logic; they engaged in epistemological debate with the sceptical 896 Stoicism *Academy, and partly anticipated Frege’s distinction between *sense and reference. In spite of their influential attempts to reconcile providence and *evil, they could not adequately explain why, when virtue was the only good, divine providence should bring it about that almost every- one is bad. Theism eventually proved more congenial than pantheism, and a psychology of conflict than the unity of the psyche; Stoicism declined as Neoplatonism developed. r.w.s. B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics (Cam- bridge, 2003). A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (London, 1974). —— and D. N. Sedley (eds.), The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cam- bridge, 1987). Texts and commentary. stories and explanation. Narrative understanding is our most primitive form of explanation. We make sense of things by fitting them into stories. When events fall into a pattern which we can describe in a way that is satisfying as narrative then we think that we have some grasp of why they occurred. It is not obvious what makes a satisfying story, but at the very least a story requires purposes fitting into a time-frame. Religions sometimes make sense of the whole world and of individual lives by fitting them together as connected stories. Nations tell stories of their past in terms of which they try to shape their futures. (Such a story is based on a chronicle of real or imagined facts, but adds to it national aims, and the idea of victory and defeat.) Scientific understanding is different. It finds patterns that are not narratives, and forces us to see the stories of our lives as patterns that we make for ourselves, which do not fit into any bigger story. a.m. *history, philosophy of; narrative. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Indiana, 1986). Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York, 1991). Adam Morton, Disasters and Dilemmas (Oxford, 1991). Stout, George Frederick (1860–1944). Taught philosophy and psychology at Cambridge, Aberdeen, Oxford, and finally St Andrews, where he established an experimental laboratory. His central work, however, was in ‘armchair’ philosophy of psychology. He held that every experience embraces a ‘thought reference’ to a real object, for even in illusions and hallucinations there is reference to something other than the experiencing subject. We do not need to impose Kantian categorical conceptions of space, time, causality, etc. on to our experiences, for we have a natural disposition to experience things in these ways. The subject of mental attributes—cognition, feeling, and ‘conation’ (*intention)—is not a Cartesian ego or a mere material object, but a unitary ‘embodied *mind’ which has both physical and mental attributes occurring in parallel. a.j.l. G. F. Stout, Mind and Matter (Cambridge, 1931). straw man fallacy. The straw man fallacy is the tactic in argument of misrepresenting an opponent’s position, making it appear more implausible, so that it can more easily be refuted, then going ahead and arguing against the imputed position as though it were really that of your opponent. For example, against an opponent who has taken a ‘green’ position, an arguer might reply that she wants to make the earth into a natural place like it was hundreds of years ago, and that therefore her argument would require the elimination of industrial production. d.n.w. Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic (Cambridge, 1989). Strawson, Peter F. (1919– ). British philosopher of logic and metaphysician, noted also for his exposition of Kant. Many of the themes which run through his work are to be found in his most influential book, Individuals (1959). Those themes include: the problem of *individuation, the distinction between *subject and predicate, the onto- logical status of *persons, and the possibility of objective knowledge—all of which Strawson handles in a way which is coloured by his respect for Kant’s approach to metaphysics. Strawson characterizes his own approach to metaphysics as *‘descriptive’ rather than *‘revisionary’, aspiring to articulate the fundamental structure of our common-sense conceptual scheme rather than to reject it in favour of a radically new vision of reality. In an early but highly influential paper, ‘On Referring’ (1950), Strawson attacks Russell’s theory of definite *descriptions as unnecessarily revisionary of our ordinary modes of speech. On Russell’s account, a sentence of the form ‘The F isG’ (for instance, ‘The present Prime Minister of the UK is grey-haired’) is not really of subject–predicate form, but is equivalent rather to an existentially quantified sentence of the form ‘There is one and only one F and it is G’. Thus, for Russell, ‘the F’ is never a referring expression, having as its *reference a particular object. Strawson com- plains that Russell fails to distinguish between sentences and the *statements made by speakers in uttering them, arguing that whenever a speaker makes a statement by uttering a sentence of the form ‘The Fis G’, he uses ‘the F’ to make ref- erence to a specific object which has the property of being F. That there is such an object is, according to Strawson, a presupposition of the speaker’s statement rather than, as Russell implied, part of what is being stated. In Individuals, Strawson explores the Kantian claim that our ability to reidentify *things over time presupposes the locatability in space of at least some of those things as objects existing independently of our subjective experi- ences of them. Although he suggests that this claim is in some respects too strong, he is broadly sympathetic to its thrust. He contends that certain privileged kinds of objects—namely, material bodies and persons possessing such bodies—constitute ‘basic’ *particulars in our com- mon-sense conceptual scheme. It is ultimately by refer- ence to particulars of these kinds that we are able, in general, to individuate and identify items of other kinds, such as events. It is noteworthy that Strawson assigns equal weight to both material bodies and persons, rather than regarding the latter as merely a species of the former. For Strawson, Strawson, Peter F. 897 persons constitute a fundamental and irreducible category of being, distinctive in having both physical and psycho- logical characteristics predicable of them. A person is not simply a physical thing, nor yet a combination of a physical body and a mind: rather, the notion of a whole person, as a psychophysical being, is conceptually prior both to the notion of a person’s body and to the notion of a mind. In his contributions to epistemology, Strawson argues for *direct realism in perception but concedes that scepti- cism concerning the external world is not conclusively refutable. At the same time, he contends that such scepti- cism is literally unbelievable, endorsing a view which he describes as ‘naturalism’. His book on Kant, The Bounds of Sense, though widely admired, is seen by some as being unduly dismissive of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism and over-optimistic in its suggestion that many of the central arguments of Kant’s critical philosophy can survive the repudiation of that doctrine. Strawson has also written influentially on the problem of *freedom and determinism, notably in a paper entitled ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (1962). e.j.l. P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London, 1959). —— The Bounds of Sense (London, 1966). —— Logico-Linguistic Papers (London, 1971). —— Freedom and Resentment and other Essays (London, 1974). —— Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (London, 1985). stream of consciousness. William James’s famous metaphor for the way *consciousness seems. In The Prin- ciples of Psychology (1890) the metaphor is introduced in a chapter entitled ‘The Stream of Thought’. Two years later, in Psychology: The Briefer Course, the corresponding chapter is entitled ‘The Stream of Consciousness’. It may be that James, who devotes much of his psychology to unconscious processes, changed the title, and thus the metaphor, in order to emphasize that the metaphor is a purely phenomenological one—consciousness seems streamlike. Since only part of thinking, the conscious part, seems any way at all, the metaphor is restricted to this part, to consciousness. The conscious stream, according to James, is personal, feels continuous, forward-moving, and in constant change. We tend to speak and focus on particular contentful states. But the metaphor is designed to draw our attention to the deep and wide currents that surround, and render meaningful in particular ways, these thoughts. The ‘halo of relations’ surrounding and consti- tuting each image or thought, James called the ‘pen- umbra’ or ‘fringe of consciousness’. o.f. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), 2 vols. (New York, 1950). —— Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892), ed. G. Allport (New York, 1961). strict implication: see implication. Stroud, Barry (1935– ). A Canadian by birth and citizen- ship, Stroud has lived in the United States since studying at Harvard in the early 1960s. He has been a Professor of Phil- osophy at the University of California at Berkeley since 1974. Stroud’s philosophical interests range widely, but he has been particularly concerned with epistemology, cer- tain aspects of the philosophy of language, and with the thought of Hume and Wittgenstein. His philosophy is more exploratory than system-building, and his outlook is broadly Humean, in that he has little sympathy for ration- alistic approaches to philosophy. He has written influen- tially on transcendental arguments, and his early article ‘Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity’ has been extensively anthologized. c.a.j.c. Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford, 1984). —— Hume (London, 1977). structuralism. An interdisciplinary movement of thought which enjoyed a high vogue through the 1960s and early 1970s—when it acquired a certain radical cachet—but which has left its most durable mark in the fields of lin- guistics, anthropology, and literary theory. What unites structuralists in these different fields is the principle, derived from Ferdinand de Saussure, that cultural forms, belief systems, and *‘discourses’ of every kind can best be understood by analogy with language, or with the proper- ties manifest in language when treated from a strictly syn- chronic standpoint that seeks to analyse its immanent structures of sound and sense. In literary criticism, theorists now rejected mere inter- pretation as a fruitless endeavour subject to all the vagaries of ad hoc, intuitive response. Only by examining the structural features of texts—poetic devices, narrative functions, techniques of linguistic ‘defamiliarization’— could criticism place itself on a firm (inductive and adequately theorized) methodological footing. In this sense the movement is a part of that wider formalist enter- prise which started out with Aristotle’s Poetics and has since then enjoyed periodic revivals, mostly—as now—in response to new ideas about language, rhetoric, or the function of criticism vis-à-vis other disciplines. Where structuralism can claim to represent a real advance is in its highly sophisticated treatment of rhetorical figures like metaphor and metonymy, figures which (according to Roman Jakobson) are the structural axes of all linguistic communication, and which are raised to their highest expressive power in poetry and other art-forms. c.n. *post-structuralism. Michael Lane (ed.), Structuralism: A Reader (London, 1970). structural violence. Popularized by the Norwegian soci- ologist Johan Galtung, the idea of structural violence involves a wide construal of violence aimed at showing that its menace is present in institutional ways even where no literal or ‘narrow’ *violence occurs. Structural violence does not involve agents inflicting damage by force, but is equivalent to social injustice. Apart from its potentiality for confusion, a key problem with the concept is its 898 Strawson, Peter F. dubious suggestion that a variety of apparently quite dif- ferent social problems are all essentially the same and will therefore yield to the one approach. c.a.j.c. J. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research (1969). structure, deep and surface. Originally used by Chom- sky as part of a theory of *grammar that would generate all and only the grammatical sentences of a speaker’s lan- guage. The deep structures of sentences (e.g. ‘Bill saw whom’) were akin to their *logical forms: the level of semantic interpretation. Surface structures (e.g. ‘Whom did Bill see?’) were derived by transformation rules which moved constituents to new positions, sometimes adding structure, sometimes deleting it. In Chomsky’s current theory, mappings from deep to surface level preserve structure. Moved items (like ‘whom’) leave traces at S-structure to mark their original positions (e.g. direct object) at D-structure. The presence of traces indicate that S-structures are not surface forms: they are shallow struc- tures occurring just below the level of perceived speech. S-structures or logical forms replace D-structures to become the levels where semantic interpretation occurs. b.c.s. N. Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (New York, 1986). Suárez, Francisco (1548–1617). Jesuit philosopher and theo- logian, born in Granada, Spain. He taught primarily at Salamanca and Coimbra. Suárez’s metaphysics, epistemol- ogy, and philosophy of law, though influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, challenged traditional scholastic views. His Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597) was the first systematic and comprehensive work of metaphysics written in the West that was not a commentary on Aristotle’s Meta- physics. For Suárez, metaphysics is the science of ‘being in so far as it is real being’ (ens in quantum ens reale) and its proper object of study is ‘the objective concept of being’. This doctrine is regarded by some as having contributed to the development of mentalism in early modern philoso- phy. Suárez’s theory of individuation reveals the influence of Ockham. The principle of individuation is ‘entity’, which Suárez identifies with ‘essence as it exists’. Existing reality is composed exclusively of individuals. j.g. e.m. *Spanish philosophy. Jorge J. E. Gracia, Suárez on Individuation (Milwaukee, Wis., 1982). subaltern. ‘Some S are P’ was traditionally said to be the subaltern of ‘All S are P’, ‘Some S are not P’ the subaltern of ‘No S areP’, meaning that the first proposition is in each case entailed by the second. The second was sometimes called the ‘superimplicant’ of the first, the first the ‘sub- implicant’ of the second. A *syllogism which draws a con- clusion about some things from premisses which merit a conclusion about all of them was said to be in the ‘subal- tern mode’. c.w. J. N. Keynes, Formal Logic, 4th edn. (London, 1906), ch. 3. subconscious mind: see unconscious and sub-conscious mind. subcontraries. Two propositions p and q are subcon- traries when, as with ‘There are fewer than 5 million unemployed’ and ‘There are more than 3 million unemployed’, they cannot both be false (so the falsity of one entails the truth of the other) but the truth of one does not entail the falsity of the other, i.e. when ‘Either p or q’ is true. Traditionally ‘Some S are P’ and ‘Some S are not P’ were called subcontraries. c.w. *square of opposition. J. N. Keynes, Formal Logic, 4th edn. (London, 1906), ch. 3. subject: see self. subject and predicate. Grammatically, a subject–predicate sentence consists of any noun phrase and verb phrase in combination, the constraints on the combination being syntactic rather than semantic. Of greater interest to philosophers has been the narrower notion of a ‘logical’ subject–predicate sentence, where the eligible noun phrases are restricted to those having a certain semantic function, namely, that of *referring to something or some- one. Thus, whereas ‘Nothing dies’ and ‘Nero fiddled’ would both satisfy the grammatical description, only the latter would be reckoned a logical subject–predicate sen- tence. More precisely, the predicate in such a sentence is described as a ‘first-order’ predicate, whereas a predicate which attaches not to a name but to a first-order predicate is known as a ‘second-order’ predicate. The logical variety is in question when it is said that ‘exists’ is not a predicate. In saying, for example, ‘The Loch Ness monster does not exist’ we can hardly be referring to a monster in the loch, so the grammatical subject is not a logical subject, and the predicate accordingly not a logical predicate. The hier- archy of predicates indicated is also thought important to an understanding of related terms, as ‘there is’ and ‘some- thing’. Starting with ‘atomic’ sentences, as ‘Rome burned’ and ‘Vesuvius is a dormant volcano’, we can derive the forms ‘Something burned’ and ‘There is a dormant vol- cano’. ‘Something’ and ‘there is’ are not logical subjects, but are predicates of a predicate, or second-order predi- cates. This whole mode of classification calls for scrutiny. Consider ‘Here is a key’. This provides a good contrast to a subject–predicate sentence in that we are not saying of something named ‘here’ that it is a key, but the adverb simply demarcates the locality where the description ostensibly applies. Similarly with ‘There is a key’, and not merely when this features ‘there’ as an adverb of place. In the existential reading what we have is a variation on this pattern, even though ‘there’ now lacks demonstrative force, approximating more to ‘somewhere’: provided a key is somewhere to be found, the form is in order. At all events, so long as the behaviour of ‘is a key’ can be reckoned the same whether it follows ‘here’ or ‘there’, we have reason not to think of ‘There is a key’ as in some way subject and predicate 899 . rejecting the institutions of the city state), the Stoics founded the tradition of *natural law. In the Roman period Stoicism became linked with the senatorial opposition to the autocratic rule. Passions de l’âme uses the idea. When we talk now of the spiritual we refer to neither of these but typically to the kind of emo- tion one might have towards God or some other factor beyond one’s material. congenial than pantheism, and a psychology of conflict than the unity of the psyche; Stoicism declined as Neoplatonism developed. r.w.s. B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics (Cam- bridge,