Tremblay on Knowledge, Training, and the Examination of Impressions

 

Tremblay on Knowledge, Training, and the Examination of Impressions

Michael Tremblay's paper "Akrasia in Epictetus: A Comparison with Aristotle" (Apeiron 53(4), 2020) addresses a problem that runs from Socrates through the Stoics and into contemporary virtue theory: whether knowledge of the Good as such is sufficient for right action.

The Intellectualist Thesis

Epictetus is a hard-line intellectualist in the Socratic-Stoic sense. All human actions flow from judgments about what is good. If someone truly knew what was good, he would act accordingly. Vice is mistaken judgment. There is no gap between genuine knowledge and right action.

The puzzle Tremblay sets up is this: if that is Epictetus's view, how can he account for the very real experience of internal conflict, relapse, and failure that his students clearly undergo? How can someone know Stoic doctrine and still act wrongly?

Three Kinds of Failure

Tremblay's decisive move is to distinguish levels of what counts as knowledge. He identifies three kinds of failure that resemble weakness of will without requiring Epictetus to abandon intellectualism.

The first is ignorance of the universal. The agent's foundational dogmata are simply wrong — he still believes externals are genuine goods. This is straightforward false judgment. Intellectualism stands intact: the agent acts on what he judges to be good, and his judgment is false.

The second is unstable or superficial grasp. The agent can recite correct Stoic doctrine but has not yet fully integrated it into his prohairesis. The principle is present in a verbal or classroom sense but not in a fully possessed sense. Under pressure — when a vivid impression arrives with force — the weakly held universal fails to govern assent. This is the philosopher Epictetus attacks in the tyrant passage: he knew the doctrine in the lecture hall and abandoned it the moment reality tested it.

The third is error in particular application. The agent holds the correct universal — virtue is the only good, externals are indifferent — but misclassifies the present situation. He assents to the impression that this insult harms him, that this loss is bad for him. The general dogma is intact. The situation-specific judgment is mistaken.

The Two-Level Foundation

Tremblay's analysis maps precisely onto the two-level structure of Epictetan foundationalism. The general dogmata — have them ready, memorized, immediately accessible — address failure of the first kind. If the foundational beliefs are correctly established, the agent is not operating from false premises about what is genuinely good.

The situation-specific dogmata address failure of the third kind. Epictetus prescribes particular dogmata for particular categories of impression — for encounters with death, with insult, with desire, with loss. These are not derived on the spot from the general principles. They must already be in place, trained and ready, calibrated to the specific impression type the practitioner will face.

Training in askesis addresses failure of the second kind. The gap between verbal knowledge and possessed knowledge is closed not by further argument but by disciplined practice that embeds the dogmata deeply enough in prohairesis to hold under pressure. This is why Epictetus insists that philosophy is not about learning arguments but about being able to respond correctly to impressions.

The Epistemic Standard

Tremblay's central conclusion is that Stoic intellectualism survives scrutiny — but only when knowledge is understood in the strict Stoic sense. What ordinary people call knowledge is often not knowledge at all. It is partial grasp, fragile conviction, untrained application. Those states explain wrongdoing without contradicting the structural thesis that action follows judgment.

His payoff line states the position precisely: knowledge of the Good is sufficient for right action, provided that knowledge means fully integrated, stable, situation-ready rational judgment.

Epictetus is not naively intellectualist. He is rigorously intellectualist, with a demanding epistemic standard for what counts as knowing at all. Training is required not because knowledge is insufficient for right action, but because most people do not yet possess knowledge in the strict sense that would make right action reliable.

Tremblay and Sterling's Foundationalism

Tremblay's paper is a scholarly confirmation from within contemporary Epictetan studies that Sterling's foundationalism accurately captures what Epictetus's practical system requires epistemologically. The two-level structure — general dogmata establishing the bedrock, situation-specific dogmata extending it into the territory where impressions actually arrive — is precisely what Tremblay's three-way distinction demands.

Foundationalism is not an external philosophical commitment imported into Stoicism. It is the epistemological structure Epictetus's practice presupposes and that Tremblay's analysis makes explicit. Sterling names it. Tremblay confirms it. Epictetus practiced it.