Many people have recently made Stoicism an important part of their lives.They are mainly focused on Stoic ethics.This popular interest comes on the tail of decades of slowly building interest in Stoicism scholarship and Stoic philosophy.Somewhat surprisingly, popular online discussions of Stoicism have increasingly involved attention to theoretical claims from the Old Stoa.Some such discussions cover matters in Stoic physics and metaphysics: the two fundamental principles of all existence, the nature of incorporeal entities, such as lekta and time, the fundamental Stoic categories of Something, Existence, and Subsistence, and several other related topics.Given both of these trends, the timing of the release of Vanessa de Harven's remarkable, monumental book, The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics: Everything is Something could not have been better.Specialists in Stoic scholarship will find a comprehensive statement of Stoics metaphysics to investigate.Contemporary metaphysicians and philosophers of language will find new options (to us) for understanding the fundamental nature of reality, the physical reality of our world, of mind, and of substantive semantics from this book.Philosophers familiar with Stoicism and Stoic enthusiasts will discover several of the claims made by de Harven at odds with the received scholarly views of Stoic metaphysics.de Harven's prime aim is to show that Stoic metaphysics forms a unity.To do this, she begins by acknowledging the hurdle all Stoicism scholars must contend with, namely, the scarcity of remaining original Stoic texts.In several ways she approaches Stoic metaphysics from a standpoint of contemporary metaphysics.She states, "I clearly do think we should avail ourselves of current metaphysics in understanding and explicating the Stoics" (26).One theme of her findings is that a number of Stoic scholars are reading twenty-first century views into particular ancient Stoic doctrines.
David Kaspar (Fri,) studied this question.