The Stoic Reality: An Interview With Vanessa de Harven
Examining the Coherence and Unity of Stoicism’s Core Ideas
I recently had the pleasure to speak at length with Vanessa de Harven, Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts, whose work in Stoic metaphysics is overturning assumptions about how the school conceptualised reality.
Our received understanding of Stoic ontology — theory of reality — is that it was cobbled together through various defences against attacks from opposing philosophies. Vanessa convincingly argues that this perception is incorrect. Her work reveals just how innovative the Stoics were in their approach to conceptualising the Cosmos in purely physicalist terms. She reveals Stoic ontology to be complex, but coherent and unified.
Vanessa has a book forthcoming, titled The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics: Everything is Something. This conversation covers many of the themes explored in the book and her previous work in the area of Stoic ontology.
Steven Gambardella: The most salient innovation with the Stoics’ understanding of reality is placing “something” over “existent” as the highest genus of reality. Can you explain why they did that?
Vanessa de Harven: Yeah. There is an answer to that question. There might be a lot of questions of…
