CPA Run — Erik Wiegardt v1.0
CPA Run — Erik Wiegardt v1.0
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Instrument: Classical Presupposition Audit (CPA) v1.1. Instrument architecture: Dave Kelly. Test criteria derived from the six philosophical commitments.
Corpus in use: Core Stoicism; Nine Excerpts; The Six Philosophical Commitments That Ground Stoic Practice; Sterling Logic Engine v4.4; Two and One-Half Ethical Systems; Stoicism and Self-Interest: What Is Our Interest?; Stoicism, Moral Facts and Ethical Intuitionism; Stoicism, Foundationalism and the Structure of Ethical Knowledge; Stoicism, Correspondence Theory of Truth and Objective Moral Facts; Stoicism, Moral Realism and the Necessity of Objective Moral Facts; A Brief Reply Re: Dualism; Free Will and Causation; Substance Dualism in Sterling’s Stoicism; Stoic Dualism and “Nature.” CPA v1.1 §IV numbering: C1 Substance Dualism, C2 Libertarian Free Will, C3 Ethical Intuitionism, C4 Foundationalism, C5 Correspondence Theory, C6 Moral Realism.
Step 0 — Protocol Activation
Corpus in view; Core Stoicism and the six-commitments document opened in full.
Subject. Erik Wiegardt: founder of the Stoic Registry (1996) and the cybercity New Stoa, founder and first Scholarch of the College of Stoic Philosophers (2008), founder and editor of the eJournal The Stoic Philosopher, founder of the Marcus Aurelius School, retired from the College in 2021. He was also the founder and owner of the International Stoic Forum, per System Map v3.4, Correction 27.
Declared locus — his own record, opened in full text:
- The Stoic Handbook, Second Edition (2010) — his own sections: Introduction, The Stoic Tradition, FAQs, the DOE commentary, Four Practical Exercises, The Ethical Paradox.
- The Stoic Handbook, College of Stoic Philosophers Preparatory School Edition (2016) — the same sections, with additions noted where they bear on a finding.
- “The Big Tent,” The Stoic Philosopher No. 11 (July–September 2014) — an argued essay in his own voice.
- His Elevator Speech, same issue.
- “Vampires & Werewolves,” excerpt from Battle of Mount Whitney and Other Essays, published at Stoicism Today (2015).
Excluded from the profile: the Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius passages he selected and re-punctuated in the Handbook. Those are expounded primary sources, not his argumentative moves.
Expository exception: not invoked, and not available. The trigger requires a domain in which his record is expository throughout. It is not. He argues in his own voice in every domain the six commitments engage, so the argued material is the source and the exception adds nothing the source requirement does not already reach.
No prior conclusion stated. Note for Step 2: a CIA run on the doctrinal system stated in the Handbook was ratified before this run. Its findings are not carried in. The two instruments have different objects, and the CPA applies the charity and load-bearing requirements the CIA does not. The runs are compared at Step 4, not before.
Self-Audit — Step 0. Corpus in view: yes. Sources identified, restricted to his own public record, and opened in full rather than from search snippets: yes. Prior conclusion stated or implied: none, and the prior run is quarantined to Step 4. Complete. Proceed to Step 1.
Step 1 — Presupposition Profile
Stage A — the argumentative record and the moves it requires.
P1. Ethics is grounded in physics. In “The Big Tent” he states that oikeiōsis, the ethical evolution from self-love to altruism, is the foundation of the whole ethical system and is rooted in Stoic physics, and that this is why one can and should be good with or without God. The Handbook makes the same move: Nature teaches what we need to know, which is why physics matters. Load-bearing. Remove it and the motto has no content and the third of the Big Tent agreements collapses.
P2. Nature is god, and what that means is left to the individual. He argues at length that the classical school was deist, monotheist and pantheist, states his own preference for panentheism by extrapolation, and then fixes the agreement as: God is nature, whatever it means to you. Load-bearing for the Big Tent argument, which is built so that the content of P2 can vary.
P3. Doctrinal minimalism. Three agreements are necessary and sufficient for Stoic identity; beyond them, atheists, agnostics, deists and theists are Stoics in good standing. Load-bearing — it is the essay’s conclusion.
P4. Only virtue is good; evil is the privation of virtue; there is no evil in Nature, only in human conduct. Argued in his own voice in all three sources. Load-bearing.
P5. Wrongdoing is a choice made under a false belief about one’s own interest, and it harms the chooser. In “Vampires & Werewolves” he argues that the liar makes himself a liar and the thief a thief, that there is no external agent of evil, and that the wrongdoer has ignored an inner voice urging him toward greatness. Load-bearing for that essay’s whole argument.
P6. Good and evil are in the will, and only the will is in our power. No one, not even a god, can take that choice away. He says the DOE is his own daily mneme and his standing answer to what Stoicism is; he argues in the rape passage that no god compels anyone and that the power to resist is real. Load-bearing everywhere in the record.
P7. Emotion follows judgment, and the judgment is what makes a thing good or bad. Stated in the FAQs and again as the First Study. Load-bearing for his account of the passions and for the happiness the Handbook promises.
P8. Man is a rational animal produced by Nature, a part of one whole, with reason as his link to the Logos. Load-bearing for P1 and for the equality argument.
P9. Faith is refused; evidence, reason and proof are the criteria; what cannot be demonstrated is left agnostic. Load-bearing — it is his stated ground for rejecting the religions’ answers on survival, and it is the method of the Big Tent essay, which corrects a scholarly usage by appeal to what is accurate.
P10. Human excellence is developmental — stages of ethical evolution, not automatic, requiring effort and practice. Load-bearing for the Ethical Paradox and for the pedagogy.
Peripheral and excluded by the load-bearing test: the Handbook’s aside deferring to fate, genetics and open ignorance for why one man rises and another falls. His argument not only survives its abandonment, it requires the opposite; the aside is stated once and carries nothing.
Stage B — domain mapping. Three domains.
- Doctrinal and metaphysical — the Big Tent, the FAQs, the Stoic Tradition. The method here is evidential and scholarly: sources weighed, terms defined, a scholar’s inconsistency identified and corrected.
- Ethical and diagnostic — Vampires & Werewolves, the DOE commentary, the Ethical Paradox. The method here is assertoric and realist: there are wrongs, the wrongdoer damages himself, the good is one thing.
- Community and institutional — whether the Stoic community should organize as a religion, and the tolerance doctrine.
The variation that matters for Step 2: in the first two domains he presupposes that there are facts of the matter his claims answer to, while his account of the passions in the first holds that value is conferred by judgment. Domain boundaries are drawn at the level of what the argument is doing. The expository exception is not in play, so Stage B carries only its original load here.
Self-Audit — Step 1. Presuppositions drawn from his own record only; no characterization by others, no inference from institutional affiliation, no material from the ancient texts he expounds. Load-bearing test applied, and one stated position excluded under it. Charity requirement applied at P6 and at the excluded aside. Domain variation mapped in advance of the audit. Complete. Proceed to Step 2.
Step 2 — Commitment Audit
C1 — Substance Dualism: Partially Aligned. Point of correspondence: the test question asks whether the individual’s inner life can be fully explained by conditions external to it. His record requires that it cannot, and this is argued rather than merely stated. The Promise passage argues that the circumstances of birth and station are the saddle and tackle and the character is the horse — that a man born in a sharecropper’s shack has the same access to nobility of character as anyone. The argument fails outright if character is constituted by class position or cultural formation. P5 requires the same: the liar makes himself a liar. Residual: P2 and P8. He argues for a pantheist or panentheist Nature in which the rational faculty is a portion of one whole, and prefers panentheism by his own extrapolation. This is monism, and it denies the ontological distinctness C1 asserts, against Nine Excerpts §4 — I am my soul, my prohairesis, my inner self, and everything else including my body is an external. The interiority his ethical arguments require is left standing on a metaphysics that cannot supply it. Not Contrary: nothing in his record argues that persons are products of economic, social, institutional or historical forces; he argues the reverse, and that argument is load-bearing. This is the run’s most contestable finding and is flagged below.
C2 — Libertarian Free Will: Aligned. P6 is asserted and defended across the whole locus, and defended against a named opposing position: the ancient excuse that a god compelled the act is answered with the claim that the power to resist is real and the excuse is nonsense. Wrongdoing in P5 is a choice, ethical advance in P10 requires an act of choice, and the DOE’s second maxim is the thing he says first when asked what Stoicism is. This corresponds to Core Stoicism Th 6 and Th 8 in structure and in substance. He nowhere adopts the classical Stoic determinism; he confines fate to externals. The one passage that might have qualified the finding was excluded at Step 1 as peripheral under the load-bearing test, and the charity requirement independently supports the reading that fate governs outcomes while the choice of good and evil does not fall under it.
C3 — Ethical Intuitionism: Contrary. P1 is a direct contradiction and it is load-bearing. Moral knowledge in his record is derived from natural fact and acquired developmentally: the foundation of the whole ethical system is oikeiōsis rooted in physics; Nature teaches what we need to know; the stages of Cicero’s account are the route by which a man comes to hold virtue good for its own sake. C3 requires that the fundamental moral truths be apprehended directly and non-inferentially — Sterling’s theorems are defensible only by appeal to intuition of their truth, and Th 10 is seen rather than inferred. Abandoning the derivation from Nature would take down P1, P2 and the third agreement together, so the contradiction cannot be set aside as peripheral. Countervailing material weighed and found not load-bearing: the inner voice in Vampires & Werewolves, which encourages rather than apprehends, and the appeal to what men praise without partiality, which is consensus-based and belongs to a passage he expounds rather than argues.
C4 — Foundationalism: Partially Aligned. Point of correspondence: he has a stopping point and he defends it. The three agreements are put as necessary conditions of Stoic identity — his rhetorical question is whether anyone can deny the motto and still be a Stoic — and the Handbook states that the foundation is secure because it rests on a single idea. That is a structured dependency, and he argues for it against the alternative he names, an eclectic hodgepodge. Residual: the content at the stopping point is fixed by derivation from physics under P1 and by the authority of Diogenes Laertius’s report, not held as self-evident and nowhere claimed to be non-inferential; and everything above the three agreements is declared revisable, since the philosophy evolves and its orthodoxy moves. C4 requires foundations that are necessary, self-evident truths any rational faculty can apprehend directly. Not Contrary: he is not an anti-foundationalist, and nothing in his record treats the three agreements as provisional or as defined by their consequences.
C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth: Inconsistent. The domain in which the presupposition corresponds is the doctrinal one, where his whole method presupposes a fact of the matter independent of who holds it: he defines terms before arguing, distinguishes deist from theist, identifies a discrepancy in a major scholar’s usage and writes to him about it, consults a second scholar, and settles the polytheism question by appeal to a source. P9 makes the presupposition explicit — evidence and proof are the criteria and faith is refused. This is load-bearing: without it the Big Tent essay has no method. The domain in which it contradicts is his account of the passions, where it is “our judgment that makes something either good or bad,” repeated as the First Study with the Shakespeare line attached. If judgment confers the value, the value judgment has no antecedent fact to answer to, which is what C5 requires, against Nine Excerpts §6 — the belief is factually false, and this is a value claim and not a psychological one. This is load-bearing too: it is his explanation of why we suffer and his account of what the practice changes. Both are required in their respective contexts and they cannot be held together. The finding is Inconsistent and not a softened Contrary: at this point his framework cannot be held coherently.
C6 — Moral Realism: Partially Aligned. The point of correspondence is substantial: P4 and P5 are stated as fact and argued as fact. Rape is wrong and the excuse is nonsense; there is no evil in Nature and no external agent of evil; the wrongdoer destroys his own character whether or not anyone notices; human equality follows from the fact that reason is common to all. These are objective-property claims and not expressions of consensus, and the content matches Th 10 and Nine Excerpts §3. Residual: the moral fact is constituted rather than discovered. What is good is what agrees with Nature, under P1 and P2, and the 2016 edition adds a second constitutive test, whether a thing contributes to one’s well-being. A good made by a relation to Nature is not a good that holds independently of that relation. Why the judgment-conferral material yields Inconsistent at C5 and only a residual here: at C5 it bears directly, since the question is the truth-status of value claims and his two positions on that question are flatly opposed; at C6 the question is whether the good is an objective property, and on that question his assertions are uniform and repeated across all three sources, with the judgment-conferral material bearing on the status of indifferents. The distinction is a judgment call and is flagged below.
Self-Audit — Step 2. All ten profile presuppositions audited; none set aside as easier. Non-Operative not used anywhere, so it cannot have been used to avoid a Contrary finding. Symmetry check: the distribution is one Aligned, three Partially Aligned, one Contrary, one Inconsistent, and it is markedly more favourable than the ratified CIA run on the same author’s Handbook. That divergence is examined at Step 4 rather than resolved by adjusting a finding here; no finding was moved to bring the two runs into line, and none was moved to keep them apart. The findings would be the same for a figure whose institutional position and social positions were congenial or uncongenial; the social and political content of the record was recorded at Step 1 and audited nowhere. Inconsistent was issued where the record requires contradictory presuppositions across domains, rather than forcing a single finding, and was not used as a softened Contrary. Complete. Proceed to Step 3.
Step 3 — Dissolution Finding
Neither C1 nor C2 is Contrary. No Dissolution.
What the framework preserves: an agent who takes up this framework as his governing self-description is not required to understand himself as constituted by his circumstances or as determined in his choices. The framework leaves standing both the ontological priority of what is his own over his station and his genuine originating power over the choice of good and evil, and it defends both against named opposing positions.
This is a finding about what the framework requires of those who adopt it, not a finding about Wiegardt’s own inner life or self-description, which the instrument does not reach. It is not a general compatibility finding: the framework returns a Contrary on C3 and an Inconsistent on C5, and No Dissolution says nothing about those.
Self-Audit — Step 3. The finding follows mechanically from the C1 and C2 findings and was not adjusted. It is stated as an implication for adopters rather than as a claim about the figure, and as a philosophical finding rather than a verdict on his institution, his teaching or his community. No Inconsistent finding fell on C1 or C2, so the qualified formulation is not required. Complete. Proceed to Step 4.
Step 4 — Summary Finding
Part A — Commitment pattern.
C1 Substance Dualism Partially Aligned C2 Libertarian Free Will Aligned C3 Ethical Intuitionism Contrary C4 Foundationalism Partially Aligned C5 Correspondence Theory Inconsistent C6 Moral Realism Partially Aligned Dissolution None
One Aligned, three Partially Aligned, one Contrary, one Inconsistent, no Non-Operative.
Strongest point of alignment: C2. Free will is the thing he defends most vigorously and most explicitly, and he defends it as origination rather than as spontaneity.
Deepest point of divergence: C3. Ethics grounded in physics is not a peripheral commitment in his record but the stated foundation of the whole ethical system, and it is the precise move Sterling’s six commitments were formulated to replace.
Domains of contradiction at C5: evidential in the doctrinal domain, judgment-conferral in the account of the passions.
The three Partially Aligned findings share one residual. At C1, C4 and C6 the correspondence is real and the residual is the same: what the corpus grounds in direct apprehension or in ontological distinctness, his record grounds in Nature. His framework reaches the corpus’s conclusions by a route the corpus rejects.
Cross-run note. The ratified CIA run on the doctrinal system stated in his Handbook returned three Divergent, two Structural Imitation and one Partial Convergence, with Partial Dissolution. This run returns No Dissolution and a substantially more aligned profile. Four reasons, none of them an adjustment. The CIA core was the intersection across the system’s declared variants, which strips out the theistic and providential content Wiegardt himself argues for and prefers. The CPA applies the charity requirement, which the CIA does not. The CPA applies the load-bearing test to his own argumentative moves, which excluded material the CIA counted as core. And the CPA excludes the expounded ancient passages, which supplied part of the CIA’s C1 evidence. The two instruments have different objects, and the divergence between the runs is the difference between a man and the minimum his community requires. The pair is worth keeping together for that reason.
Part B — Dissolution finding. No Dissolution, on the grounds stated at Step 3.
Part C — Agent-level implication. An agent who adopts this framework as his governing self-description takes on the following. He may hold, and will be supported in holding, that he is not the product of his circumstances and that the choice between virtue and its lack is genuinely his. He will also take on the claim that what makes that choice the right one is a fact about Nature, discovered by studying it, and that his moral knowledge is therefore a developmental and derivative achievement rather than something he can see. When he then tries to test a value-impression, he will find two incompatible accounts of what he is testing: on one, the impression asserts something true or false about the good; on the other, his judgment is what makes the thing good or bad in the first place. The first account is the one his diagnosis of wrongdoing requires. The second is the one his account of his own suffering requires. Nothing in the framework tells him which to use, and the corpus’s position is that only the first will hold — the value judgment is factually false or it is not, and that is a value claim, not a psychological one.
Corpus boundary declaration. The corpus addresses individual virtue and rational agency. It contains no theory of religious institutions, no doctrine of community organization, no position on the questions of religion, sexuality, race, gender or government that appear in the record, and no standard for evaluating a school’s curriculum or a teacher’s effectiveness. The Contrary finding at C3 means his argumentative record requires a presupposition that contradicts the commitment. It does not mean he is a poor Stoic, that his teaching is unsound, that the College or New Stoa should be judged in any direction, or that his long practice is impeached. The instrument does not reach any of that and has not attempted it.
Self-Audit — Step 4. Pattern stated with counts; deepest divergence and strongest alignment identified; the Inconsistent finding’s domains named. Dissolution restated with its grounds. Agent-level implication addressed to the agent considering adoption, not to the figure audited and not to the system in the abstract. Political and institutional verdicts withheld; the corpus boundary declaration issued in full. The summary is self-contained. Complete. CPA run complete.
Items Carried
O13 — dissolution rule gap, second instance. The gap recorded as O11 in the CIA run has the same shape here. CPA v1.1 computes Full Dissolution from two Contrary findings, Partial from one Contrary and one Partially Aligned, and No Dissolution from neither Contrary. One Contrary paired with one Aligned falls under the third clause and returns No Dissolution, which is defensible but unstated; one Contrary paired with a Non-Operative is not addressed at all. Both instruments should close their rules together.
O14 — contestable findings marked in place. C1 and C6 are the run’s two judgment calls. If C1 were ruled Contrary, the dissolution finding would fall into the gap described at O13 rather than move to Partial.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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