Two Approaches to Stoicism: Sterling’s Chain and Living Stoicism v0.3
Two Approaches to Stoicism: Sterling’s Chain and Living Stoicism v0.3
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Sterling’s name stands on the chain and the commitments, cited to his texts. The contrast, the characterizations of Living Stoicism and the CPA findings are Dave Kelly’s.
Both Grant C. Sterling and the founder of Living Stoicism take Stoicism seriously as philosophy, and both approaches can be called academic, but in different senses. Sterling, himself an academic philosopher (Eastern Illinois University), asks whether the system is consistent and true. Living Stoicism, closer to the academic history of philosophy, asks what the ancient Stoics held and stays faithful to it. This document states where the two approaches differ and what the difference comes to.
The Beginning
S1. Everyone wants happiness. Incomplete happiness is not worth accepting if complete happiness is available. Complete happiness must therefore lie wholly within our control. Only assent lies wholly within our control. Happiness is therefore correct assent, correct when it matches the truth about value. The truth about value is that only virtue is good and only vice is evil. Everything else is indifferent. (Dave Kelly’s framing of Sterling’s system, The Nine Distinctions — Developed v1.2.)
S2. The six commitments replace the ancient Physics (C1, C2, C6) and Logic (C3, C4, C5) as what the chain requires. (C1 — What the Commitment Carries, R6.)
S3. Sterling departs openly from the ancient school on free will. (C2 — What the Commitment Carries, R8.)
L1. Stoic ethics rests on the ordered cosmos; Daltrey finds no other foundation for it. (CPA Run — James Daltrey, P1, from “The Scientific God of the Stoics,” 2019.)
L2. Only bodies exist and act; Cosmos, God and Nature are one; human beings are matter particularly arranged. (Same run, P2.)
L3. Everything can in principle be explained by what went before. Daltrey rejects the word “determinism” but holds this. (Same run, P3, reported words.)
L4. The run’s findings: C1, C2 and C3 Contrary; C4 and C6 Partially Aligned; C5 Aligned; Full Dissolution. (Same run.)
L5. Daltrey led a deprecation of the dichotomy of control and of practice. (Dave Kelly, 17 October 2026, citing “What is Controlling What?”, Living Stoicism, 2023.)
H1. John Sellars holds that no set of key Stoic ideas can easily be identified, and treats “Stoic” historically: those who gathered at the Stoa, then readers of Stoic books. (“What Was Stoicism?”, Antigone, 3 June 2026.)
Part One — Where Each Begins
D1. Sterling begins from a derivation, with ethics first and the commitments as what it requires. (S1, S2)
D2. Living Stoicism begins from the cosmos, with physics first and ethics read out of it. (L1, L2)
D3. The order of dependence is reversed. For Sterling, what the world is like matters to ethics only as far as the chain requires. For Daltrey, the ethics stands only as long as the physics does. (D1, D2)
Part Two — The Faculty
D4. The chain needs a self that is the faculty and whose assent is its own doing. (S1, S2: C1, C2)
D5. Corporeal monism and causation from what went before leave no faculty set apart and no assent that is originated. (L2, L3)
D6. Hence the contradictions at C1 and C2, and Full Dissolution. (L4)
Part Three — Practice
D7. For Sterling the chain is lived by: the value claim taught first, then the governed assent, with recovery after failure. (S1; The Commitments in Practice)
D8. With the dichotomy of control and practice deprecated, what remains is the system understood and contemplated as a whole. (L5)
D9. That is what is meant by calling the Living Stoicism approach aesthetic: Stoicism admired as an ordered whole rather than run as a discipline. (D8) Dave Kelly’s characterization.
Part Four — Authority
D10. For Sterling, authority is argument: the set that is consistent and true, with departures stated. (S1, S3)
D11. For Living Stoicism, authority is fidelity to the ancient system as scholarship presents it. (L1, L2) This is closer to Sellars’s historical sense of the word. (H1)
D12. The two approaches ask different questions. Sterling asks whether it is correct. Living Stoicism asks whether it is authentically Stoic. (D10, D11)
D13. On Sellars’s own account, departing from Chrysippus was ordinary Stoic practice, so the historical question gives no ground for counting Sterling out. (S3, H1)
What This Document Does Not Claim
- No finding on whether Daltrey’s reading of Stoic physics is historically accurate. The CPA issues none.
- Two of the run’s locus texts are bylined Keith P. Myers and are admitted as Daltrey’s reported words.
- “Aesthetic” is Dave Kelly’s characterization, not Daltrey’s self-description.
- No claim that Sellars and Living Stoicism hold the same view, only that D11 is nearer to his.
Sources
- Core Stoicism (Sterling, ISF, 2005)
- The Nine Distinctions — Developed v1.2
- C1 — What the Commitment Carries: A Study Note v0.1
- C2 — What the Commitment Carries: A Study Note v0.1
- The Commitments in Practice: Presupposed, Professed and Taught v0.1
- CPA Run — James Daltrey
- “What is Controlling What?” (Living Stoicism, 2023)
- John Sellars, “What Was Stoicism?”, Antigone, 3 June 2026
Version Note
v0.3 supersedes v0.2. S1 now carries the chain in the corpus’s standing prose wording; v0.2 rendered it as a sequence of arrows, which read as a single run of inferences. No other proposition changes. v0.2 superseded v0.1 by replacing the lead paragraph, which had denied a contrast between academic and amateur that the document never offered the reader.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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