Stoic Logic, Mates, Chapter 1, §3 Sources for Stoic Logic

by Corry Shores
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Benson Mates

Stoic Logic

Chapter I: Introduction

§3 Sources for Stoic Logic

Almost all Stoic writings were lost. Few fragments remain. Thus our sources are secondary. And most of them unfortunately oppose Stoicism.

Yet much of Stoic logic was recorded in introductory texts. Our secondary sources drew from these.

These secondary sources did not often cite individual Stoic authors. So we must take the Stoic teachings as a whole.

Our best secondary source is third century AD Skeptic Sextus Empiricus. But he quotes the Stoics only to refute them. (8-9)

Diogenes Laertius is our next best source. He also probably lived in the third century AD. His treatments of Stoicism are reliably sourced. But they are brief.

We have few other sources than these. They are sparse and unsatisfactory.

The more interesting Stoic logical ideas involved difficult terminology that other writers struggled to grasp. Thus,

All our sources have one characteristic in common: the more interesting the logic becomes, the more corrupt the text becomes. (10a)

As a result, the following reconstruction of Stoic logic must sometimes be complex and unclear. (10b)

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From:

Mates, Benson. Stoic Logic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. [Originally published in 1953 as Volume 26 of the University of California Publications in Philosophy.]