Stoic News

By Dave Kelly

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Stoicism, Politics, and the Best Form of Government — Grant C. Sterling

Three messages by Grant C. Sterling. First and Second: Stoics Yahoo Group, August 1 and August 3, 2013, thread “Re: Stoic politics.” Third: Stoics Yahoo Group, June 19, 2009, thread “Re: Could ancient philosophers have invented popular sovereignty?” Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026. Layer: Theoretical Core — Political Philosophy. Attribution: Sterling.

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

These three messages constitute Sterling’s most direct and sustained treatment of political philosophy from within his Stoic framework. They are significant for several reasons.

First, they establish that Sterling does not regard Stoicism as politically indifferent. While agreeing that the ideal Stoic state would be a community of Sages requiring no ordinary government, he holds that for a country of non-Sages — that is, for any real society — the form of government matters philosophically. Some systems encourage virtue; others discourage it; and some structurally conflict with Stoicism’s most fundamental presuppositions.

Second, they establish Sterling’s positive political preference: the Aristotelian virtue-state — a government that affirms a clear conception of virtue and uses the power of the state to guide people toward it. This is not libertarianism (which Sterling argues may encourage vice faster than some totalitarianisms by treating freedom as license for entrenched desires), not democracy (which Plato’s Republic diagnoses with precision), and not Marxism, fascism, or theocracy (all of which Sterling rejects on the grounds that they require the individual to dissolve himself into a collective, an economic system, the State, or submission to a deity).

Third, they establish Sterling’s framework for evaluating political positions philosophically: the test is whether a system’s presuppositions conflict with Stoicism’s foundational commitments. This is the theoretical ground on which the Sterling Ideological Audit rests. Sterling himself identifies the dissolution-producing ideologies by name and by the specific presuppositions that make them incompatible with Stoicism.

The June 2009 self-description — “Grant, the fascist anarchist :)” — is ironic, but illuminating. It captures the tension Sterling identifies: the Stoic rejects all ideologies that subordinate individual rational agency to collective systems (hence “anarchist” in the sense of resisting systemic authority), while simultaneously holding that the best available government for non-Sages is one that uses state power to guide people toward virtue (hence “fascist” as a wry acknowledgment that this position is not liberal or libertarian). The irony is precise: neither label fits, which is Sterling’s point.

Message One: Stoicism and the Stoic Idea of the City — On Marx and the Stoics

Grant C. Sterling to the Stoics Yahoo Group, August 1, 2013. Thread: “Re: Stoic politics.” Responding to the question of whether the Stoic Idea of the City resembles the communist utopia of Karl Marx.

Yes, and No.

There are certainly similarities in the changes in the traditional state called for by Zeno and Marx. If you look primarily at specific ideas about how the state is to be organized, the systems will seem related.

But there is a fundamental divergence in the principles on which their visions are based.

For Marx, humans are fundamentally plastic, molded by their societies into the shapes they take. There is no human nature for Marx, except in the limited sense that we all desire to engage in productive activity. Societies do this, on his view, in a way dominated by economic systems. So economics determines human behavior. The ideal society can be achieved, then, simply by initiating the correct economic system, which will produce ideal people.

The Stoics, of course, would have rejected this entire line of reasoning. They were not social determinists of any kind, and certainly not economic determinists. They believed in fundamental principles of virtuous behavior, which Marx would not have accepted.

As a philosopher, the divergence of the principles seems vastly more important to me than the partial convergence of structures.

Your Mileage may vary.

Regards, GCS

Message Two: The Best Government for a Country of Non-Sages

Grant C. Sterling to the Stoics Yahoo Group, August 3, 2013. Thread: “Re: Stoic politics.” Responding to Steve Marquis on Stoicism, individual agency, and political philosophy.

I certainly agree that Stoicism is about individual choice, and that (as such) it rejects all systems (such as Marxism) which claim that manipulation at the level of government or society is what is truly important. It is individuals who make choices, and individuals who will attain (or fail to attain) eudaimonia on their own power.

I further agree that the true ideal state for the Stoics is a community of Sages, and such a community would have no need for a government anything like that found in other societies.

On the other hand, I do not agree that the quality of a society is irrelevant to the question of whether a given person will attain virtue and eudaimonia. While anyone is capable of making the right choice at any given time, and hence is capable of progressing towards Sagehood, it seems obvious to me that some social settings encourage virtue and some discourage it. (This is how Aristotle, so close to the Stoics in most other doctrines, approaches politics — given that eudaimonia is attained by individual virtue, what social systems will encourage and aid the citizen in seeking it, and what systems will lead the citizen away from it?)

When the Marxist calls for the workers to identify themselves with the collective “the workers” and to rise in rebellion against the state because all that ultimately matters is the economic structure of society, he does indeed seem to me to be proclaiming a political aim that conflicts with Stoicism. The same is true of the fascist who tells the individual that she is nothing more than an organ of the State, or the Islamist who tells her that her only worth comes in submission to Allah, and so the state must be theocratic and anti-rational. I could cite others along this line, but I think this suffices.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that the best government for the Stoic is libertarian or democratic. If “freedom” is understood to mean “do whatever you feel like doing at the moment”, such a system actually encourages people to accept and act on their entrenched desires and urges, and this may lead him away from virtue faster than even the totalitarianisms considered above. (For a perfect vision of this, read the section of Plato’s Republic on democracy … or look around you in a country like the U.S.)

So I think the best government for a country of non-Sages is the same government suggested by Aristotle — one that affirms a clear conception of virtue and uses the power of the state to guide people towards it. Not a government that maximizes freedom, nor one that aims primarily at economic prosperity or equality or conquest or any of the other goals that are so widely discussed today. No political party that I know of advocates this — indeed, I highly doubt if any party could ever secure an elective victory on such a platform. Probably most people on this List would find it appalling. But that’s what I think best fits with Stoicism.

On a more practical level — the Sage in a modern society will support or oppose government policies according to whether they seem likely to increase justice and virtue or lead away from them. It will be an act of practical wisdom to choose candidates, parties and policies to support, and no general statement can simplify things. (That is, in a U.S. context, the Stoic will sometimes look like a Republican, sometimes like a Democrat, and sometimes like neither one. Sometimes she will actively campaign for causes, and sometimes she will ignore politics completely and concentrate on plans in her individual family or workplace, etc.)

Regards, Grant

Message Three: Popular Sovereignty as Myth — The Fascist Anarchist

Grant C. Sterling to the Stoics Yahoo Group, June 19, 2009. Thread: “Re: Could ancient philosophers have invented popular sovereignty?” Responding to Jan Garrett on the invention of popular sovereignty as a political myth.

I disagree with this view of philosophical invention, but that’s neither here nor there. For the rest of this post I will accept your theory for the purposes of argument.

I’m confused. I thought the question was could ancient philosophers have invented popular sovereignty. It seems clear to me that Plato is close enough to the idea of popular sovereignty here that a Platonist could have taken the next step. I agree that none of them did.

I disagree — I think the ‘mythic material’, as you say, was quite rich, although I agree with you that the Stoics did not in fact develop such a doctrine. (Which is fine with me, since I think the doctrine is unnecessary insofar as it is true, and pernicious insofar as it is false.)

Regards, Grant, the fascist anarchist :)

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

These three messages together constitute the primary source material for Sterling’s political philosophy as derived from his Stoic framework.

The August 2013 messages establish the three-part structure of Sterling’s political position. First, Stoicism and Marxism are incompatible not because of surface structural differences but because of fundamental divergence in principles: Marxism is economic determinism applied to human nature; Stoicism holds that individuals make choices independent of material conditions. Second, several ideologies conflict with Stoicism at the level of presupposition, not merely at the level of policy: Marxism requires identifying with the collective; fascism requires treating the individual as an organ of the State; Islamist theocracy requires grounding individual worth in submission. These are named as incompatible because they require dissolution of the individual rational agent into something external to it. Third, the best available government for a country of non-Sages is the Aristotelian virtue-state: one that affirms virtue as its organizing principle and uses state power to guide citizens toward it. This is explicitly preferred to libertarian freedom (which may encourage vice by treating freedom as license) and to democratic preference-satisfaction (which Plato diagnoses as producing a society of entrenched desires).

The June 2009 message establishes Sterling’s treatment of popular sovereignty as a political myth — a useful fiction that replaced an older fiction without becoming more true. His description of himself as “the fascist anarchist” is ironic and precise: he resists all ideologies that subordinate individual rational agency to collective systems, while holding that the best available government uses state authority to promote virtue. The liberal-democratic consensus finds both positions threatening, which is Sterling’s joke.

For the Sterling Ideological Audit, these messages provide the theoretical foundation for the dissolution criterion and the positive account of why philosophical compatibility findings matter. Sterling himself identifies the dissolution-producing ideologies by the presuppositions that make them incompatible: Marxism dissolves the individual into economic structure; fascism dissolves him into the State; theocracy dissolves him into submission to a deity. The framework for the SIA’s Stage One core audit is already present in Sterling’s own analysis.

Sources: Stoics Yahoo Group. “Re: Stoic politics,” August 1, 2013 and August 3, 2013; “Re: Could ancient philosophers have invented popular sovereignty?” June 19, 2009. Author: Grant C. Sterling. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026.

The Stoic Relationship to Country

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

I. The Question Stated

The question of the Stoic relationship to country is a question about the classification of an external and the duties generated by a social relation. It is not a question about sentiment. The modern vocabulary of patriotism — love of country, national pride, attachment to homeland — frames the relation as an emotional bond whose intensity measures its authenticity. The classical Stoic framework frames it differently. Country is a standing social relation into which the agent has been placed; the relation generates role-duties; the object of those duties is a preferred indifferent; and the agent’s genuine good lies entirely in the correctness of his conduct within the relation, not in the fortunes of the country itself. Each element of this answer follows from the corpus, and each is developed below.

The classical ground is Enchiridion 30. Duties are in general measured by social relationships. Epictetus develops the point through the case of the father: one is called upon to care for him, to give way to him, to submit even when he reviles or strikes. To the objection “But he is a bad father,” Epictetus answers that nature did not bring you into relationship with a good father, but simply with a father. The duty attaches to the relation, not to the quality of its object. And Epictetus explicitly extends the structure beyond the household: by acquiring the habit of looking at social relations, the agent discovers what duty to expect of his neighbor, his citizen, his commanding officer.

Country belongs to this series. The agent finds himself a citizen of a particular polity by birth or circumstance — a fact assigned by the way things are, not chosen from a menu of alternatives. The relation is real, and it generates appropriate actions: lawful participation, honest dealing with fellow citizens, discharge of civic obligations, service where the role requires it. These duties do not depend on the country being admirable, well-governed, or successful, any more than filial duty depends on the father being kind. Nature brought the agent into relation with a country, not with a good one. The duty attaches to the relation.

This role-based structure is the corpus’s general account of appropriate action. The role of citizen is generated by an actual social relationship, and the duties it generates are determined by that relationship — not by the agent’s feelings about the country, not by the country’s performance, and not by whether the agent would have chosen this citizenship had the choice been his.

III. Country as a Preferred Indifferent

The country itself — its security, its prosperity, its standing among nations, its survival — is an external. It lies outside the agent’s prohairesis, and its condition is not within his control. On the corpus’s classification, it is a preferred indifferent: rational to protect, genuinely better present than absent, an appropriate object of aim — and not a genuine good whose loss would constitute a genuine evil to the agent.

The Sterling Decision Framework’s national-security scenario states the classification directly at the level of the highest civic role. The security of the nation’s infrastructure is a preferred indifferent — rational to protect, genuinely better than its absence, not a genuine good whose failure would constitute a genuine evil to the agent’s prohairesis. The agent’s role-correct action in the situation is his only genuine good. What holds for the President holds for every citizen: the false impression to be stripped is that the country’s fate determines the moral quality of the agent’s civic conduct. It does not. The quality of his judgment determines it.

This classification is what separates the Stoic relationship to country from patriotism as ordinarily understood. The patriot in the ordinary sense has assented to the proposition that the country’s flourishing is a genuine good and its decline a genuine evil. From that assent the familiar pathē follow: exultation at national triumph, grief and rage at national humiliation, fear for the nation’s future. The Stoic citizen aims at his country’s flourishing — it is a preferred indifferent, and pursuing it is appropriate — but he pursues it with reservation, staking nothing of his own good on the outcome. He serves his country fully. He does not require it to prosper in order to be well.

The distinction between full engagement and correct valuation governs here as it governs everywhere in the corpus. Marcus Aurelius performs his role as emperor with complete commitment while treating no outcome as a genuine good whose frustration constitutes genuine harm. Full engagement with the civic role and correct valuation of its objects are not in tension. The distressed patriot believes they are, because he has conflated the country’s fortunes with his own good.

IV. The Political Dimension: Sterling on Country and Virtue

The classification of country as a preferred indifferent does not render the quality of a country philosophically irrelevant. Sterling addresses this directly in the ISF political messages of August 2013.

Sterling agrees that Stoicism is about individual choice and rejects all systems that locate what truly matters at the level of governmental or social manipulation. It is individuals who make choices, and individuals who attain or fail to attain eudaimonia on their own power. He agrees further that the true ideal state for the Stoics is a community of Sages, which would need no government resembling those of actual societies. But he denies that the quality of a society is irrelevant to whether a given person attains virtue. While anyone is capable of making the right choice at any given time, some social settings encourage virtue and some discourage it. This is the Aristotelian question — given that eudaimonia is attained by individual virtue, what social systems aid the citizen in seeking it and what systems lead him away from it — and Sterling adopts it as the correct Stoic question about political life.

From this follows Sterling’s test for political arrangements: whether a system’s presuppositions conflict with Stoicism’s foundational commitments. Marxism, which dissolves the individual into the economic collective; fascism, which reduces him to an organ of the State; theocracy of the anti-rational kind, which locates his worth entirely in submission — each requires the individual to surrender the ontological priority of his own rational agency, and each therefore conflicts with Stoicism at the level of presupposition, not merely policy. A form of “freedom” understood as license to act on entrenched desire fails the same test from the opposite direction, encouraging the citizen to entrench the false value judgments that lead away from virtue.

The relationship to country is therefore not politically indifferent. The Stoic citizen has a philosophically grounded stake in what kind of country his country is — not because the country’s character is his good, but because the country is the setting in which he and his fellow citizens pursue virtue, and settings differ in whether they aid or obstruct that pursuit.

V. Practical Civic Engagement

At the practical level, Sterling’s account yields a citizen whose political engagement is calibrated by practical wisdom rather than fixed by identity. The Sage in a modern society supports or opposes government policies according to whether they seem likely to increase justice and virtue or lead away from them. Choosing candidates, parties, and policies is an act of practical wisdom, and no general statement simplifies it. In a modern context the Stoic will sometimes align with one party, sometimes with another, and sometimes with neither. Sometimes he will campaign actively for causes; sometimes he will ignore politics entirely and concentrate on his family or workplace.

The corpus’s account of the practical Sage in political life adds the governing constraints: he holds political outcomes with reservation, and he is not identified with a movement. His engagement is real — the duties of citizenship are genuine role-duties, and evasion of them is a role failure — but his identity is not staked on political victory, and his equanimity does not rise and fall with election returns. The election result is an external. His vote, his advocacy, his honest judgment about justice and virtue: these are within his purview. The outcome is not.

VI. The Structure Summarized

The Stoic relationship to country has four elements, each dependent on the last.

First, country is a real social relation into which the agent has been placed, and it generates genuine role-duties — the duties of the citizen — that hold regardless of the country’s quality, on the same structure by which filial duty holds regardless of the father’s quality.

Second, the country itself is a preferred indifferent: an appropriate object of aim, rational to protect and serve, and not a genuine good. The agent’s genuine good is confined to the correctness of his own civic conduct.

Third, the quality of the country is nonetheless philosophically significant, because social settings differ in whether they encourage or discourage virtue, and the citizen’s practical wisdom rightly attends to that difference in evaluating political arrangements — rejecting outright any system whose presuppositions dissolve individual rational agency.

Fourth, civic engagement is governed by practical wisdom case by case: sometimes active, sometimes withdrawn, always with outcomes held in reservation and identity never surrendered to a movement.

The citizen this structure produces is neither the nationalist, whose good is staked on the nation, nor the detached cosmopolitan for whom citizenship generates no duties. He is the agent Epictetus describes: one who has acquired the habit of looking at his social relations and discovering in each of them — neighbor, citizen, commanding officer — what appropriate action requires, while keeping his desire and aversion confined to the only thing that is his.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Friday, July 17, 2026

The Stoic Philosophical Training Method — Version 1.0

Primary source: Stoicism Is Not Therapy, But Training (Grant C. Sterling, International Stoic Forum, February 25, 2008, three-part exchange with Jules Evans). Method architecture: Dave Kelly. Layer: Applied Practice — Training Instruments.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Governing Principle

Sterling’s exchange with Evans yields one non-negotiable design constraint, stated across all three parts: psychological benefit is parasitic on belief, not on technique. A thought journal, a mindfulness practice, an exercise in challenging negative thoughts — none of these are Stoic in themselves. They become Stoic only when the belief that motivates them is the Stoic doctrine that externals are neither good nor evil. The same technique, paired with a different belief, is not Stoic training. It is generic coping dressed in Stoic vocabulary. As Sterling puts the point: all psychological benefits that Stoicism conveys can come only to those who believe Stoic principles. The psychology is parasitic on the philosophy.

The method is therefore organized doctrine-first. Technique is introduced only after the doctrine that gives the technique its content has been genuinely accepted — not merely performed, recited, or provisionally entertained. This ordering is the structural difference between this method and the technique-first designs of cognitive-behavioral and positive-psychological programs, which teach the practice and offer the doctrine as optional framing. Sterling’s argument is that this ordering is not a matter of pedagogical preference. A technique detached from its doctrine carries no Stoic content at all.

The aim of the method is correction of judgment, not improved functioning as a freestanding goal. Improved functioning is what follows from corrected judgment. It is not what is targeted. A method that targets functioning directly has already substituted a technical problem for a normative one, and at that point the vocabulary of the method may remain Stoic while its content has been displaced.

Three Structural Constraints from the Source

First constraint — immunization, not cure (Part One). Sterling: the Stoic medicine has to be administered before the shock. Stoicism functions as an immunization, not as a cure. The method is therefore sequenced for the pre-crisis period. It is standing philosophical formation, undertaken before the person needs it, presented as a discipline of study rather than a treatment. It is not a crisis-response protocol, and it must not be offered as one. A person already in acute distress who has not done the doctrinal work is, on Sterling’s own account, largely outside what the method can do directly: at the bottom, Stoicism says that distress comes from false beliefs about the world, and the distress will not go away while the false beliefs remain. What the method offers such a person is honest acknowledgment of this limit — not a compressed version of the training.

Second constraint — no technique without belief (Part Two). Sterling: you cannot use these techniques — or, at any rate, there won’t be anything remotely Stoic about your use of these techniques — if you don’t accept the core principles of Stoicism. Every technique in the method carries an explicit belief-check. The method does not teach a practice and separately teach theory. It teaches the theorem, confirms the person actually holds it, and only then attaches the technique to that theorem as its practical expression. A technique introduced before the belief is in place is pedagogically empty and is withheld — it is not offered as scaffolding toward the belief.

Third constraint — no truncated doctrine (Part Three). Sterling: you cannot coherently believe that our suffering never comes from externals without holding that externals are neither good nor evil. The method rejects the two-tier design in which the accessible insight (thoughts cause suffering) is taught while the radical claim (virtue is the only good) is withheld as advanced or optional. Sterling’s argument is that these are not two claims of different difficulty — they are logically equivalent, and separating them produces an incoherent halfway position, not a gentler one. If externals were genuine goods or evils, then the perception of a genuine evil would cause justified suffering, and the loss of a genuine good would too. The method teaches both halves together from the first session, phrased as plainly as the person’s level requires, but never presents the core insight without its full implication. Technical terminology is never required — Sterling is explicit that the doctrine may be phrased in whatever way will help the person learn it — but the doctrine itself is never reduced.

Modes of Application

The method operates in two modes. In self-application mode, the practitioner works through the phases alone, using the corpus documents named in each phase and applying each exit condition to himself in writing — the written record is what substitutes for an instructor’s check. In instruction mode, an instructor who has himself completed the method conducts the phases with another person, administering the exit conditions conversationally. The phase structure, sequencing rule, and exit conditions are identical in both modes. The sequencing rule binds both: no phase is entered until the prior phase’s exit condition is met, and no exception is made for urgency, enthusiasm, or apparent aptitude.

Phase One — Doctrinal Foundation

No technique is introduced in this phase.

The content of this phase is the core doctrine, delivered as argument rather than assertion: externals — things not in our control — are neither good nor evil; virtue is the only good and the source of happiness; distress is produced by false beliefs about the value of externals, and by nothing else. The person should see why the claims follow and how they connect, not simply be told that they are true. Sterling’s own successes, by his account, came from exactly this: convincing people of the truth of Stoic ideas, in ordinary language, through exactly the kind of reasoned exchange the doctrine itself calls for.

Corpus documents serving this phase: the Core Stoicism theorem sequence, beginning from Theorem 1 (everyone wants happiness) and proceeding through the fork to Theorem 10; the Nine Excerpts; The Little Enchiridion.

Exit condition: the person can state, unprompted and in his own words, both halves of the doctrine together — that suffering comes from belief and not from externals, and that externals are neither good nor evil — without treating them as separable claims. This is a comprehension-and-assent check, not a recitation check. In self-application mode, the statement is written from memory and then compared against the doctrine; in instruction mode, it is elicited without prompting.

Phase Two — Apologetics

No technique is introduced in this phase.

The doctrine, once stated, provokes predictable resistance. Sterling names the standard objections from his own experience teaching friends and students, and the method treats these as the core of an objection bank to be worked through directly, each objection answered from the specific doctrine that resolves it:

Objection one: “Doesn’t this mean I’d have to be an emotional zombie?” Answered from the doctrine of eupatheia: the Stoic is not without affect; the corrected judgment produces its own well-founded states. The objection assumes that the only alternatives are ordinary passion or numbness, and the doctrine denies the dichotomy.

Objection two: “Doesn’t this mean I’d never eat or do anything, since nothing would be good or evil?” Answered from the doctrine of preferred indifferents: that externals are not goods does not make them equal. Food, health, and companionship are preferred; their opposites dispreferred; rational action selects among indifferents continuously. The objection confuses the denial of genuine value with the denial of all rational ground for selection.

Objection three: “I cannot change my desires.” Answered from the doctrine that desires follow from beliefs about value, that such beliefs are in our control, and that assent to the impression that one has been harmed can be refused. The objection treats desire as brute; the doctrine shows it to be judgment-dependent, and judgment to be the one thing that is up to us.

The instructor — or the self-applying practitioner — need not use the technical terms eupatheia or preferred indifferents. Sterling is explicit on this. But the ideas themselves must be explained, because without them the objections stand, and while the objections stand the person will never assent to the doctrine, and while assent is withheld the training confers nothing.

Corpus documents serving this phase: Two and One-Half Ethical Systems (for the structure of value and the preferred-indifferents architecture); the Manual of Stoic Rational Agency; Seddon’s Glossary for terminological precision where wanted.

Exit condition: the person can raise his own strongest objection to the doctrine and work through its resolution without being talked through it. The objection need not be one of the three above — a novel objection resolved independently is stronger evidence of assent than a rehearsed answer to a stock one.

Phase Three — Technique, Attached to Belief

Only now are practical techniques introduced, and each is bound explicitly to the theorem it enacts. Sterling’s test governs the whole phase: train oneself to stay mindful of what? Keep thought journals about what? A technique either reflects the underlying Stoic doctrine, or it is in no way a distinctively Stoic technique. The method’s techniques are therefore reframed versions of practices that have generic counterparts elsewhere, and the reframing is the substance:

Examination of impressions. Not generic thought-challenging. The practitioner examines whether an arriving impression asserts that an external is good or evil, and withholds assent if it does. The negative thought is challenged because it rests on the false belief that externals have value — that is what makes the challenge Stoic rather than merely cognitive. The ratified Five-Step Method, in its two modes (standing disposition; recovery audit), is the structured form of this discipline and is incorporated here without modification.

The training journal. Not generic reflection. The journal records impressions examined, assents withheld or corrected, and the specific theorem engaged in each case. An entry that records distress without identifying the value-judgment that produced it is incomplete by the method’s standard.

Scenario rehearsal. Anticipatory examination of impressions not yet arrived — the practical form of the immunization principle. The practitioner rehearses the loss, the insult, the failure, before it occurs, and examines in advance the impression it will bring. This is where the first constraint becomes daily practice: the medicine administered before the shock.

Corpus documents serving this phase: The Five-Step Method (Commitment Operations Across Each Step); the Manual of Practical Rational Action; the SDF Scenario Generator Instrument, adapted to produce individual rehearsal scenarios.

Exit condition: the person can apply a technique to a live impression and correctly identify, unprompted, which doctrine the technique is enacting. Fluent execution of the technique without the identification fails the check — that failure pattern is precisely the substitution of performed vocabulary for held belief, and it is undetectable from inside, which is why the check is external and explicit.

Phase Four — Standing Practice and Apologetics in the Moment

The method’s final phase is not an ending but a standing state: continuous application of the Phase Three disciplines, with the journal as the ongoing record and periodic re-administration of the Phase One and Phase Two exit conditions as a drift check.

This phase also locates the one form of help the method offers a person in present difficulty: what Sterling calls Stoic Apologetics applied in the moment — reminding someone who already holds the doctrine of the truths he has embraced, when a specific circumstance has shaken his application of them. Sterling is careful about this distinction and the method preserves it. Epictetus’s counsel on distressing circumstances is addressed, in every case Sterling can identify, to someone who already accepts Stoic doctrine. Helping such a person is reminding, not persuading, and it works because the belief is present and needs only to be brought to bear. Helping a person who does not hold the doctrine is a different task — it is Phase One, and it cannot be compressed into a crisis. The method requires its practitioners, in either mode, to know which of these two situations they are in, and to refuse the pretense that technique alone can bridge the difference.

What This Method Is Not

The method is not therapy, and the distinction is substantive, not rhetorical. Therapy, in its contemporary institutional form, treats distress as dysfunction and aims at symptom reduction within the patient’s existing value framework. This method treats distress as the consequence of false judgments about value and aims at the correction of those judgments against what is actually true. It does not adopt the patient’s value framework as given; the value framework is precisely what is under examination. Its measure of progress is not reported relief but corrected assent — relief follows, as Sterling’s exchange maintains throughout, but as consequence, never as criterion. A practitioner who finds the method’s vocabulary drifting toward the therapeutic register — symptoms, coping, wellness, management — should treat the drift itself as a finding: the words have outlived the doctrine in his practice, and Phase One is where he returns.

Primary source: Stoicism Is Not Therapy, But Training (Grant C. Sterling, International Stoic Forum, February 25, 2008). Method architecture: Dave Kelly. Preserved and compiled by Dave Kelly, 2026.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Sterling Source Arguments for the Six Classical Philosophical Commitments

Reference index. Each Classical Field Audit contains links to Sterling source texts for each of the six commitments. Each “Governing Corpus Text:” line pins an abstract commitment to a specific, dated primary-source argument in Sterling’s own words, so a field audit’s finding is checked against what he actually wrote rather than a paraphrase of it. Index architecture: Dave Kelly. 2026.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

C1 — Substance Dualism

Stoicism, Substance Dualism, and the Irreducibility of the Rational Faculty (Sterling, ISF January 20, 2012 and February 28, 2013): no physicalist account has explained how particles undergoing electro-chemical processes could possess the felt character of pain or the conceptual content of a valid logical inference; the dualism is directed at contemporary physicalism specifically, not defended by appeal to ancient Stoic cosmology.

C2 — Libertarian Free Will

Free Will and Causation (Sterling, ISF August 18, 2021): Chrysippean compatibilism fails because the character that causes an act was itself never up to the agent — an unchosen initial character makes every downstream choice inevitable; the genuine alternative requires Acts of Reason as a distinct, non-physical causal power operating alongside physical causation, not reducible to it.

C3 — Ethical Intuitionism

Stoicism, Moral Facts, and Ethical Intuitionism (Sterling, ISF February 24 and March 13, 2020): alternatives are intuitionism or nihilism, no third option; moral terms cannot be heard, smelt, tasted, seen, or felt; the same rational faculty that gives knowledge of mathematical truths gives knowledge of moral truths.

C4 — Foundationalism

Stoicism, Foundationalism, and the Structure of Ethical Knowledge (Sterling, Stoics Yahoo Group January 19, 2015 and June 5, 2017): the fundamental truths of ethics are necessary, self-evident truths apprehended through rational perception, not derived from theology or empirical observation — moral properties cannot be sensed, so the is/ought gap cannot be bridged by any statement about what one can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell.

C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth

Stoicism, Correspondence Theory of Truth, and Objective Moral Facts (Sterling, Stoics Yahoo Group August 20, 2015 and ISF January 10, 2022): the only criterion of truth is correspondence with the facts, and the Stoics were pure realists on this point; the revisionary claim that pain, death, and rejection are not genuine evils depends on there being objective facts for value impressions to correspond to or fail to correspond to.

C6 — Moral Realism

Stoicism, Moral Realism, and the Necessity of Objective Moral Facts (Sterling, Stoics Yahoo Group January 13, 2015 and ISF May 26, 2021): moral reasons must exist independently of any agent’s contingent desires — the Stoic claim that harming one’s parents is a reason not to act, whether or not the agent cares about them, requires that this be a moral fact; if there are no objective moral facts, the Stoic project fails utterly.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Free Will and Causation

Post by Grant C. Sterling to the International Stoic Forum, August 18, 2021, thread “Free Will and Causation.” Reply to Steve Marquis, who had raised whether the individual rational agent’s power of assent is a source of uncaused causation within the Logos. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026. Layer: Theoretical Core — Philosophical Commitments. Attribution: Sterling.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

This is Sterling’s single most substantial archived statement on libertarian free will, and it proceeds by way of a direct rejection of Chrysippus’s compatibilism. Sterling’s argument is that Chrysippean “freedom” — an action is “up to us” because it is caused, at least in part, by our own character — is not freedom in any sense worth having, because the character that does the causing was itself never up to us. Using the example of three judges who differ in what bribe would move them, Sterling traces the causal chain back to an initial character that was never chosen, making every subsequent choice and every subsequent modification of character an inevitable consequence of a starting condition wholly outside the agent’s control — a chain that on Chrysippus’s own account applies with equal force to Zeus. Sterling then proposes his own solution: physical causation (PC) operates by ceteris paribus laws that hold only when no other force intervenes, and Acts of Reason (AR) are precisely such an intervening force, genuinely mental and genuinely causal, not derived from or reducible to physical process. The physical world was never a causally closed system; AR is not an inexplicable imposition on an otherwise complete physical order but a full partner in the causal structure of reality, and one Sterling holds we understand more directly than we understand most physical causation. This is the primary-source ground for C2 as a commitment distinct from mere compatibilism: origination of assent, not the compatibilist redescription of determined character-caused action as “free.”

Message: Sterling on Chrysippus, Acts of Reason, and the Causal Nexus

Grant C. Sterling to the International Stoic Forum, August 18, 2021. Responding to Steve Marquis’s August 8, 2021 post, which had asked whether an individual rational agent’s power to assent or withhold assent constitutes a source of uncaused causation within the Logos, comparable to the cosmos’s own first cause.

Marquis had written, in part: “We have in our power the ability to assent or withhold assent. Is this, like a global first cause, a source of uncaused causation or not? The older Chrysippuean view is one of the little dog tethered to the cart — our power of choice is limited to going along calmly or resisting and causing ourselves unnecessary stress. But even this stringent view of Compatibilism has an uncaused component — our vicious choice to assent to false impressions tightens the tether. … If this manifests in the causal nexus as a consequence of an uncaused cause in any way in the slightest then we essentially have individual rational agents as part of the Logos in an ongoing act of creation.”

All: I think much of the problem stems from a certain way of thinking about what you call ‘the causal nexus’.

For Chrysippus himself, there is nothing whatsoever that looks like what I think is the ordinary notion of free will. For him, actions are “free”, or “up to us”, only in the sense that they are caused (at least in part) by our own character. For people like me, this doesn’t look like “freedom” in the least.

So, for example, suppose Able, Baker, and Charlie are judges. It is a simple fact, on this view, that if Able is offered a bribe of $1,411+ to find an obviously guilty defendant innocent, he will accept it. But Baker won’t — it will take at least $7,465 to get him to agree. Charlie, on the other hand, won’t accept any monetary bribe whatsoever, but will find someone innocent if offered an evening of sexual adventure with Mary-Kate Olsen (but not Ashley). If Able is offered a bribe of $2,000, and he accepts, then Chrysippus will say that this was “up to him”, since it was his character that caused him to take the bribe — after all, Baker or Charlie would have refused. The problem, for people like me, is that Able’s character is not up to him in any robust sense. He was born with a certain initial character (and that was not up to him in any sense at all), and his first choice (whatever it was) was dictated by that initial character. That initial choice may have created a modification of his character, which led to another choice, etc. So since his initial character was totally and completely out of his control (even in Chrysippus’ sense), and since every action and every modification of character follows necessarily from that initial state, that (it seems to me) makes everything out of his control.

(Or, to put it another way, Chrysippus wants to make a distinction between externals, which are not in our control, and internals, which are. But there doesn’t seem to be any relevant difference, on his view, between the process that leads to my assenting to impression X and the process that leads to rain in Spain falling (mainly) on the plain. Given the state of the universe 3,000,000 years ago, each was inevitable.)

Notice, by the way, that the same is true with Zeus. Following the last Conflagration, He had a certain character, which caused necessarily His first act, etc. So, to me, that means that nothing whatsoever is really in the control, even of the very gods. The Stoics want to make acts of Reason (especially divine acts of Reason) to be something different from other acts in some important way. (Even if they conceive those acts as somehow “Physical” acts of “Pneuma”.) But I see nothing in Chrysippus’ views that justifies any distinction at all.

As you suggest, Steve, it isn’t just the determinism itself that causes the problem (although that’s a sufficient problem for me). Even if we introduce quantum indeterminacy into the system, it doesn’t really matter. Chrysippus shows us no interesting metaphysical distinction between acts caused by our character (or by our “Reason”) and other things — there’s no real difference between my being caused to assent to an impression by my character and the food in my stomach being caused to dissolve by my digestive juices, or the atmospheric conditions in Spain causing rain to fall (mainly) in the plain.

So, enough of Chrysippus.

Later Greek Stoics retain much of the language of Chry., but appear to back away from his explicit determinism. By the time of the Roman Stoics, even much of the language disappears. Epictetus doesn’t spend time discussing fiery Pneuma or defending the essential “physicalness” of all things in the universe, he doesn’t try to defend compatibilism against the sorts of attacks I suggested above, etc. Perhaps he believed in those things — I don’t know. But he sees that those discussions have the effect of derailing the Stoic ethical project.

I’ll offer a proposed solution. I don’t claim that it is a Stoic solution, in the sense that I don’t claim to have derived it from Stoic texts. But I don’t think there’s anything in it that a Stoic (other than Chrysippeans) would object to.

We have an ordinary understanding of normal, physical causation (PC). (Let’s leave quantum indeterminacy out of this — I don’t think it changes anything of philosophical import.) There are certain fixed laws of nature, there are definable physical states, and those two together dictate the next set of physical states. We also have an ordinary understanding of choices, which I will call “Acts of Reason” (AR). I think about some alternatives, and I choose one of them to act on. On this ordinary understanding, there are no fixed laws of human behavior, and the choice is guided by our character, by our preferences, etc., but not dictated by those things (except perhaps in cases where we have strong reasons to do X and virtually no reason to do anything else).

If we mix these two together, we get chaos. PC tells us that if we could only figure out the precise location and character of the physical components of our brains, plus the laws of nature, we could say with certainty exactly what anyone will do next. AR tells us that (except in unusual situations), we can’t. PC says that the laws of nature do not mention any mental states, and that the universe is causally closed under those laws — hence, “thoughts” cannot cause anything whatsoever to happen (even other thoughts). AR tells us that our thoughts cause things to happen all the time — indeed, that we have a much clearer understanding of how my dislike of Aunt Wilma’s cooking leads me (not “causes me”) to choose to offer to take everyone out to a restaurant for dinner, than we have of how adding Mentos causes Diet Coke to explode. (I.e., we can see how the one is logically connected to the other in the first case, but not the second.)

So philosophers for millennia have sought to bridge this gap. Many, like Chrysippus, have done so by subjecting AR to PC. (There is a wide variety of ways to fill in the details of this, which we need not consider here.) Some have shrouded it in mystery. (For example, the non-Chrysippean Greek Stoics held that Pneuma was physical… and, at the same time, they held that it didn’t operate quite like the other elements operated.) A few have subjected PC to AR — for example, Malebranche held that God (i.e., Divine Reason) dictates the state of the physical world at time t, and then dictates its state at t1. There is no such thing as physical causation — the appearance of such causation is the result of God’s orderly nature, as He chooses to create a new world at t1 that bears a patterned resemblance to the world of t. Berkeley held that “physical object” is the name of a class of mental concepts, and so all causation is mental. (He, too, held that most of this causation is divine.)

I think the best hope for a coherent view is to observe that all laws of nature include a clause that they hold only if no other forces operate on the system. If I strike the cue ball at a specific angle and with a specific amount of force, it will roll in a specific way (based on the characteristics of the pool table, the location of other balls, etc.) But if, at the instant I strike it, someone punches one of the players and he lands backwards in the middle of the table, the trajectory of the cue ball that would have occurred may be radically upset. If the physical world (permit me to use that term in a way that excludes both God and mental processes) is a closed system, then this clause doesn’t operate — no ‘new’ forces can ever operate on the system as a whole. Some scientists talk as if we must assume this for science to make any sense at all, but I see no reason why we should believe that to be true. Some people (scientists and non-scientists alike) talk as though we have substantial reason to believe that this is in fact true, but they are wrong — we have no substantial evidence in favor of this idea.

So suppose that we reject it. Suppose we hold that the physical world is not causally closed. Then we are free to think that some results are caused by AR, either divine or human (or alien, or animal, if you think those beings exist and have this particular sort of Reason).

Don’t get me wrong — I am NOT suggesting that we picture a physical world that runs along doing it’s own thing and then suddenly a super-natural event overrides the normal, natural outcome. That’s the way that scientific determinists characterize the opposing view, precisely in order to make it appear irrational. I am not suggesting that causally-closed physical processes are the natural order of things, and free will (human or divine) is an inexplicable imposition on this order. I am suggesting that the physical world is not and never was a closed system, and that physical causation is only a part of the causal structure of the world. It is not the biggest part or the most important part, only the easiest part to mathematize. As I said before, we have a much more coherent understanding of how our ideas are related to our choices than we have of how most physical events occur — if anything, it is AR which is normal, natural, and comprehensible. If, as you believe, Mind or Logos (or Reason) is necessary to prevent pure entropy, then Mind is shaping the course of the Universe all the time, not just in occasional dramatic incidents of alleged divine intervention.

Now what happens downstream of our own choices? Clearly, since the vast majority of the time our bodies execute the things that our Reason dictates (though seldom with the ultimate consequences we sought), our Acts of Reason have bearing on what happens outside our minds. That’s by no means to deny that Divine Reason shapes and coordinates these results. If it conflicted with the Divine Story for me to punch my Chair in the nose, then of course God could and would prevent it — but ordinarily NOT by having my body suddenly not carry out my will.

Maybe that’s the best analogy — God (Logos, etc.) as a divine storyteller. That’s appropriate, because Reason operates by coordinating and making sense out of otherwise disparate thoughts. God guides the whole thing along, physical and mental, while allowing us to be our own storytellers within the framework of the greater story.

Enough poetry — it’s not my natural milieu. If physical causation is a system of ceteris paribus rules, and if Reason (divine and human) can make ceteris not paribus, then there is no conflict between causation and free will, they are both parts of a larger nexus (or story).

Regards, GCS

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

This message establishes the four load-bearing claims Sterling makes about libertarian free will as a philosophical commitment, and it does so specifically by rejecting the Chrysippean compatibilist alternative rather than by ignoring it.

First: Chrysippean compatibilism — an act is “up to us” because it is caused by our own character — does not secure genuine freedom, because the character doing the causing was itself never up to the agent. Sterling traces this regress back to an initial character the agent did not choose, making the entire subsequent chain of choices and character-modifications an inevitable unfolding of a starting condition wholly outside the agent’s control. This is the argument from unchosen origin: compatibilism relocates the causal story without ever reaching a point where the agent is the genuine first cause of anything.

Second: the argument applies with equal force to Zeus. If divine acts of Reason follow necessarily from an initial divine character fixed at the last Conflagration, then nothing is in the control even of the gods, and Chrysippus has given no principled reason why Reason’s acts should count as different in kind from any other caused event, including rain falling on a plain.

Third: the positive solution rests on distinguishing physical causation (PC) from Acts of Reason (AR) as two genuinely distinct forms of causal power operating within the same world, neither reducible to the other. Physical laws hold only ceteris paribus — only when no other force intervenes — and AR is a real, intervening force, not a redescription of physical process. The physical world was never a causally closed system in the first place; Sterling holds this is an unproven and unevidenced assumption smuggled in by scientific determinists, not an established fact science requires.

Fourth: AR is not the more mysterious or less comprehensible of the two forms of causation. Sterling holds that we understand the logical connection between a reason and a choice — why dislike of a dinner leads to an offer of a restaurant — more directly and more clearly than we understand many ordinary physical causal chains. This reverses the usual presumption that physical causation is the default, well-understood case and mental causation is the puzzle requiring special defense.

Source: International Stoic Forum. “Free Will and Causation,” August 18, 2021, replying to Steve Marquis’s post of August 8, 2021. Author: Grant C. Sterling. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Stoicism, Substance Dualism, and the Irreducibility of the Rational Faculty

Two posts by Grant C. Sterling to the International Stoic Forum. First: January 20, 2012, “A Brief Reply, Re: Dualism,” in reply to Malcolm. Second: February 28, 2013, “Stoic Dualism and ‘Nature,’” in reply to TheophileEscargot. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026. Layer: Theoretical Core — Philosophical Commitments. Attribution: Sterling.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

These two messages together constitute Sterling’s most direct primary-source statement of substance dualism as a philosophical commitment, and they are notable for what they are not: neither message argues for dualism by appeal to ancient Stoic physics or Stoic cosmology. The January 2012 message is explicit that Sterling’s dualism is “not developed in opposition to the ancient Stoic metaphysics, but to modern scientific physics” — the argument is that no physicalist account, ancient or modern, has ever explained how particles undergoing electro-chemical processes could have the qualitative character of pain or the conceptual content of a valid logical inference. The certainty of qualitative mental experience is offered as more secure than any other proposition Sterling holds. The February 2013 message extends the argument from mind in general to moral knowledge specifically: if no domain of inquiry uses a single method, and if mathematical and logical truths are not best answered by empirical observation, then morality — which Sterling holds can never be empirical — requires the same non-physical rational faculty that grasps logical necessity. The sandwich examples work through competing natural inclinations (self-preservation against social cooperation) to show that a physicalist “nature-studied-scientifically” cannot adjudicate what one is actually obligated to do; only a rational faculty capable of intuiting the wrongness of taking what belongs to another can. Read together, the two messages ground C1 in the same epistemic structure that grounds C3 (Ethical Intuitionism) and C5 (Correspondence Theory): a physical account of mind cannot house a truth-tracking faculty, and without such a faculty neither mathematical nor moral knowledge is possible.

Message One: A Brief Reply, Re: Dualism

Grant C. Sterling to the International Stoic Forum, January 20, 2012. Replying to Malcolm on whether the ancient Stoic account of the mind as a “state of matter” is compatible with modern physicalism.

Malcolm:

In brief, my position is like this:

1) I am absolutely certain, beyond any possibility of error, that I have qualitative mental experiences. I am more certain of this than any other proposition.

2) Experience consistently tells me that I make choices on the basis of the qualitative content of these experiences. For example, I engage in complex reasoning (I may read a philosophical proof, which I find convincing because I recognize it as having a certain logical form which I have previously analyzed and found to be deductively valid), and on the basis of this reasoning I may come to believe a proposition which leads me to act in certain ways. (As an example, I have turned down an opportunity to eat veal, which I find to be extremely delicious, on the basis of arguments designed to show that the way in which the veal is raised is morally repugnant. Or, I have consciously chosen to think about outcomes in a different way as a result of long discussions about Stoic theory of personal identity and harm.)

3) Science tells us that when we are having mental experiences our central nervous system is undergoing various sorts of electro-chemical processes.

My dualism is not developed in opposition to the ancient Stoic metaphysics, but to modern scientific physics.

You say that for the ancient Stoics, the human mind is a “state of matter”. The problem that I was bringing up is that there is no room in modern Physics for any such notion. Modern Physics recognizes only physical matter in the brain, consisting of various particles undergoing various electro-chemical processes. None of those particles or processes are understood as having characteristics like “the feeling of pain” or “the concept of modus ponens”, etc.

So, today, in 2012, if you say that “the mind is a state of matter” then you must either explain how it is that various brain particles can have such properties, or claim that there exist forms of “matter” that are utterly unlike any that physicists have discovered. I see no hope in accomplishing either of those goals. Hence, I see no way that a philosopher today can claim that the mind is a form of matter. (I am no idiot — I know full well that many, perhaps most, philosophers hold such a view. I am asserting that they have never explained how this is possible.)

Regards, Grant

Message Two: Stoic Dualism and “Nature”

Grant C. Sterling to the International Stoic Forum, February 28, 2013. Replying to TheophileEscargot on whether dualism fractures the unity of Stoic thought and disables its ability to guide action.

On 2/26/2013, TheophileEscargot wrote: “This dualism however creates some differences from ancient Stoicism. First, the appealing unity of Stoic thought, where a single system applies to all domains, is lost.”

The ancient Stoic system already allowed for the ‘sayables’, which are not corporeal.

More seriously, I think it is obvious that no single way of investigating a problem applies to all domains. Despite frantic efforts, no-one has convinced me that mathematical (or logical) questions are best answered by empirical observation. And I think Sam Harris’ work contains a clear and obvious error right at the beginning — science cannot tell us what life is “better” than another life, and even if it could it cannot tell us why we have a genuine obligation to pursue ends that are not important to us. But that’s a very long story, which I won’t explore right now — suffice it to say that I don’t think morality is or can ever be empirical. And since I don’t see how science can ever claim to evaluate the subjective content of people’s minds, I don’t think real psychology is empirical, either. (The discipline called “psychology” pretends to be a science, but psychologists blatantly cheat by accepting the introspective reports people give of their mental states as data, while then claiming not to be following an introspective — and hence non-empirical and non-physicalist — discipline.)

But if we define “Nature” as “the realm of all things that exist”, then of course all of us dualists are just as much ‘naturalists’ as anyone, and just as committed to a ‘unity of all knowledge’. Indeed, I would have much preferred it if the word ‘science’ still had its original meaning (any type of knowledge) rather than its modern meaning (a strictly empirical investigation). I would be happy to say that I study “moral science”, if that word had not been corrupted.

TheophileEscargot continued: “Second, it becomes more difficult to apply decision criteria to what is virtuous, since nature-studied-scientifically cannot be used for guidance. E.g. suppose I miss breakfast, and at work I see a tasty-looking sandwich someone has stored in the fridge, which I could eat without being identified as the culprit. Is it moral for me to eat the sandwich? The ancient Stoics would say no, it is immoral, because the nature of human beings is cooperative and social, and it goes against that nature to eat a sandwich reserved for someone else. What criteria does a dualistic modern Stoic use to decide whether to eat the sandwich?”

But is it not also my nature to seek self-preservation? So why isn’t it ‘natural’ for me to eat nourishing food when I’m hungry?

Suppose we change the case — suppose that it is my sandwich sitting on the table in front of me, but some other person grabs it to eat it himself. Now is it moral for me to take the sandwich back from the other person?

Or suppose that you and I are in a plane that crashes on a (previously) deserted island, and we’re the only survivors. We both see a sandwich, which belonged to one of the now-deceased passengers. Who gets it? It’s in my nature to seek self-preservation, but also in my nature to be socially cooperative. It’s in your nature to seek self-preservation, but also to be socially cooperative. What should I do?

Or take a radically different case — I am a judge, you are on trial. There is overwhelming proof of your guilt, and you have been convicted. The law says that the penalty is 10–20 years in prison. Do I uphold my social nature by enforcing the law of society, or uphold my social nature by acting altruistically towards you and setting you free, or uphold my goal of self-preservation by asking you for a bribe to set you free?

This is why I hate it when people (often empiricist-physicalists, but often not) equate “morality” with “altruism”. Even if the two concepts often coincide, they by no means always coincide. That an action was “altruistic” can (with proper finagling of definitions) be observed. That the altruistic action is truly virtuous or appropriate cannot.

So unless we accept that we have some sort of ability to intuit the truth of certain fundamental propositions (in logic, mathematics, ethics, theory of knowledge, etc.), we cannot get anywhere in any subject. Few empiricists have actually acknowledged the paucity of information we receive from the senses. Even fewer physicalists have attempted to explain how the idea of “understanding”, “thinking” etc. make sense in the realm of a theory which allows only for mass, charge, etc.

So, as a dualist, I think that we can know that it is wrong to take that which belongs to another, and we can know that in the original circumstances my desire for tasty food is insufficient reason to overturn the prima facie wrongness of stealing. I would happily say that it violates my nature as a rational being to act in this way — I just see no reason to think that my nature as a rational being is a physical thing, known by means of the five senses.

Regards, Grant, unabashed Stoic dualist

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

These two messages together establish the primary-source ground for Sterling’s substance dualism, and they establish it on epistemic rather than cosmological grounds.

First, from the 2012 message: qualitative mental experience is the proposition Sterling holds with more certainty than any other. No physicalist account, including modern physics, has explained how particles undergoing electro-chemical processes could possess the felt character of pain or the conceptual content of a valid logical inference. The dualism is directed against contemporary physicalism, not against ancient Stoic materialism — Sterling explicitly declines to found his position on a defense of ancient Stoic physics.

Second, from the same message: the burden of proof runs against the physicalist, not the dualist. Anyone claiming the mind is a state of matter must either explain how brain particles acquire qualitative and conceptual properties, or posit an unknown form of matter unlike any physics has discovered. Sterling holds that neither has been accomplished.

Third, from the 2013 message: no single method of investigation applies to every domain. Mathematical and logical truths are not best known by empirical observation; morality, on Sterling’s account, can never be empirical; and the subjective content of minds cannot be evaluated by a science that only pretends to non-introspective method while secretly relying on introspective reports as data. This is the direct link between C1 and C3: if the rational faculty that grasps logical necessity is not physical, and if moral knowledge requires the same kind of non-empirical grasp, then moral knowledge requires a non-physical faculty.

Fourth, from the same message: the sandwich examples demonstrate that appeals to a physicalist “nature-studied-scientifically” cannot resolve genuine moral questions, because natural inclinations toward self-preservation and social cooperation can conflict, and no empirical fact about which inclination is stronger settles which action is right. Only a rational faculty capable of intuiting the wrongness of taking what belongs to another — a faculty Sterling holds is not a physical thing known by the five senses — can adjudicate the case.

Sources: International Stoic Forum. “A Brief Reply, Re: Dualism,” January 20, 2012; “Stoic Dualism and ‘Nature,’” February 28, 2013. Author: Grant C. Sterling. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Stoicism, Correspondence Theory of Truth, and Objective Moral Facts

Two posts by Grant C. Sterling. First: Stoics Yahoo Group, August 20, 2015, thread “Re: Regarding Criterion of Truth / Cognitive Impressions.” Second: International Stoic Forum, January 10, 2022, thread “Re: What is Truth?” Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026. Layer: Theoretical Core — Philosophical Commitments. Attribution: Sterling.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

These two messages together constitute Sterling’s most direct statement of the correspondence theory of truth as the only defensible criterion and his argument that Stoicism cannot stand without it. The August 2015 message establishes the core claim: correspondence with reality is the only criterion of truth; the Stoics were pure realists in this regard; and the entire revisionary project of Stoicism — the claim that value impressions are false — depends on there being objective facts for impressions to correspond to or fail to correspond to. Remove the correspondence criterion and there is no basis for calling value impressions false rather than merely culturally contingent or personally inconvenient. The January 2022 message adds the epistemological clarification that Scruton’s objection to correspondence theory fails because it demands a definition of “fact” when “fact” is already the fundamental ontological category — at some point something must be accepted as foundational. This is where correspondence theory and foundationalism meet: both require that some categories be accepted as primitive rather than defined in terms of something more fundamental.

Message One: Correspondence Is the Only Criterion of Truth

Grant C. Sterling to the Stoics Yahoo Group, August 20, 2015. Thread: “Re: Regarding Criterion of Truth / Cognitive Impressions.” Responding to a challenge to the objectivity of the criterion of truth and the concept of cognitive impressions.

A) I am, in this thing like almost all others, a philosophical dinosaur.

The only “criterion of truth” that I recognize is correspondence with the facts — correspondence with reality. I reject utterly any notion of “truth” wherein something can be “true” and yet not match reality. And I am an authentic Stoic in this regard — the Stoics were pure realists in this regard.

You say that you are not prepared to accept the idea of an objective “what is”. But this threatens the very basis of Stoicism. Because the foundation of Stoicism is the notion that things that are not in our control are neither good nor evil — that Virtue is the only good and Vice the only evil. These are taken to be objective facts.

Pain and death and defeat and unemployment and rejection (etc.) all seem to be bad things. “Common sense” says they are bad things. Our pre-existing notions say that they are bad things. Stoicism says that nevertheless they are not — all these impressions are false, and we must radically revise the way we see the world to embrace the truth. If we undermine the claim that there are objective facts, it is hard to see what justifies us in radically revising our beliefs.

B) The Stoics do not hold that the Cognitive Impression is the criterion of truth — they hold that it is the basis of knowledge. Those are utterly different, although related, ideas.

Consider: “The number of molecules of O(2) in this Pepsi can is even” and “The number of molecules is odd.” Either the first or the second is true, and the other is false. It is absolutely impossible for any human being to know which is which. Having a cataleptic impression guarantees truth, because a cataleptic impression by definition always corresponds to the facts. But billions of sentences are true for which no one has a cataleptic impression.

C) For a sentence to be known to be true, one must have a clear understanding of the terms in the sentence. So in order to know the truth of “I see a chair,” you must have a clear understanding of chairs. An impression held by someone who lacks that clear understanding cannot be cataleptic with respect to that category — but this does not undermine the existence of cataleptic impressions as such. Many things we believe are things that we cannot or do not know, because we do not have a cataleptic impression of them. I believe that Barack Obama is President of the U.S., but I do not have a cataleptic impression that this is true, so I do not “know” it. I nevertheless believe that it is objectively true — I assent to the (non-cataleptic) impression that it is the case.

Regards, Grant

Message Two: Correspondence Theory and the Fundamental Ontological Category

Grant C. Sterling to the International Stoic Forum, January 10, 2022. Thread: “Re: What is Truth?” Responding to the claim, based on Scruton, that trying to decide what is true is futile because the concept of fact cannot itself be defined.

In order to define some term informatively, there need to be other, more fundamental notions that you can appeal to.

Scruton’s fallacy is his failure to see that at some point this process must stop. He has answered the question “What is Truth?” completely — truth is correspondence of a statement with the facts. Then he demands a definition of “fact”, and is frustrated that none is forthcoming. But that is because he demands too much — he has made “facts” into the fundamental ontological notion, and is then frustrated when he finds that he cannot define it in terms of more fundamental notions. But that is not because “truth” cannot be defined — it is because he cannot see that at some point something must be accepted as fundamental.

(The Stoics never used the cataleptic impression as a criterion of truth — they used it as a criterion of knowledge. That is very different. And interpretations of Stoicism exist that are immune to the standard objections, although some of the Stoics may not have seen the problems. But, again, this only connects to knowledge, not truth.)

Regards, GCS

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

These two messages together establish the three most important claims Sterling makes about correspondence theory as a philosophical commitment.

First, from the 2015 message: correspondence with reality is the only criterion of truth, and this is the authentic Stoic position. The Stoics were pure realists. Any theory of truth that permits something to be true without matching reality is rejected without qualification. This is Sterling’s foundational epistemological stance, and it is not tentative or hedged.

Second, from the 2015 message: the entire revisionary project of Stoicism depends on correspondence theory. The claim that value impressions are false — that pain, death, defeat, and rejection are not genuine evils despite appearing to be so — requires that there be objective facts for impressions to correspond to or fail to correspond to. If there are no objective facts, Stoicism cannot call these impressions false. It can only say they are inconvenient, or culturally contingent, or personally unhelpful. The normative force of the Stoic revision is entirely carried by the claim that the impressions are factually wrong, not merely psychologically uncomfortable. Remove correspondence theory and that claim has no ground.

Third, from the 2022 message: the demand that “fact” itself be defined is a regress demand that misunderstands foundational categories. Correspondence theory defines truth in terms of facts. Facts are the fundamental ontological category. At some point something must be accepted as fundamental and not further defined. This is the junction between correspondence theory and foundationalism: both commitments require accepting certain categories as primitive rather than derived. The objector who demands a definition of “fact” is making the same error as the objector who demands a justification for Theorem 10 from something more fundamental — both fail to see that foundational categories terminate the regress rather than extending it.

Sources: Stoics Yahoo Group, “Re: Regarding Criterion of Truth / Cognitive Impressions,” August 20, 2015; International Stoic Forum, “Re: What is Truth?”, January 10, 2022. Author: Grant C. Sterling. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Stoicism, Foundationalism, and the Structure of Ethical Knowledge

Two posts by Grant C. Sterling. First: Stoics Yahoo Group, January 19, 2015, thread “Re: Two (Types of) Moral Premises.” Second: Stoics Yahoo Group, June 5, 2017, thread “Re: Basic Stoic Ethical Principles.” Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026. Layer: Theoretical Core — Philosophical Commitments. Attribution: Sterling.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

These two messages constitute Sterling’s most direct treatment of the foundationalist structure of ethical knowledge and the independence of foundational ethical propositions from both theology and empirical observation. The January 2015 message sets out Sterling’s taxonomy of knowledge sources and identifies self-evident necessary truths — known through rational perception rather than sensory input — as the correct account of how foundational moral propositions are known. This is the epistemological ground of the foundationalism commitment: Theorem 10 is a self-evident necessary truth apprehended through rational perception, not derived from prior premises and not imported from theology or experience. The June 2017 message establishes the independence of foundational ethical beliefs from theological beliefs through the distinction between beliefs that merely connect and beliefs that logically support one another. Stoic ethics and Stoic theology are connected — each makes the other more coherent as a whole — but neither is the logical ground of the other. Refute the theology and the ethics stands. Dissolve the ethics and the theology stands. This is the structural claim that makes Sterling’s reconstruction philosophically defensible: the six commitments do not rest on cosmological or theological foundations that have collapsed. They stand independently.

Message One: Two Types of Moral Premises — The Structure of Ethical Knowledge

Grant C. Sterling to the Stoics Yahoo Group, January 19, 2015. Thread: “Re: Two (Types of) Moral Premises.” Responding to Steve Marquis on the sources of moral knowledge.

By “moral” I meant the properties of goodness, badness (evil), virtue, vice, preferred, dispreferred, right, or wrong. None of those properties can be sensed. Some of these properties may not be fundamental — i.e., some may be defined in terms of others. I was not concerned with this distinction in that post. Any value content in one of my impressions cannot have come directly from the five senses.

The world is a certain way. We receive basic concepts from the world. (Or perhaps some are innate.) Then we make up arbitrary systems of noises, and squiggly marks, to refer to those concepts. So the words are totally arbitrary and conventional. But the basic concepts they refer to cannot be totally arbitrary, or else you would use a word and I would stare at you blankly. And the nature of reality is not arbitrary or conventional. Of course, we can also make up complex concepts based on the simpler concepts we perceive. But all words that we invent to refer to complex properties are meaningful only insofar as they are composed of simpler properties we are aware of.

If our words do not refer to anything that exists in reality, then no-one’s definitions are right. If our words do refer to things that exist in reality, then: (a) if the property is simple, the word has no definition — you cannot define, for example, the experience of yellow; all we do is conventionally agree which noise will correspond to which property; (b) if the property is complex, then whoever’s definition matches reality best is objectively right. The arbitrariness of language in no way makes truth arbitrary.

There are (at least) four sources of knowledge:

(a) Sensory experience — experiences in the mind which we take to be caused by our five physical senses.

(b) Extra-sensory experience — mystical experience, religious experience, divine revelation, pronouncements of the moral sense, clairvoyance. What all of these share is the idea that we can detect contingent truths about the external world. Since these are contingent truths, our knowledge of them will vary. If you have learned the truth of proposition ‘p’ by clairvoyance, then I cannot know that ‘p’ is true unless I also have the same clairvoyant experience. What one person has learned this way, another need not know.

(c) Rational perception of self-evidence — this is different from all the others. A self-evident truth can only be evident through itself, and so only a necessary truth can be self-evident. Knowing a truth because it is self-evident is not the same thing as learning a truth by experience, even mystical, religious, or extra-sensory experience. In the case of (a) and (b) we learn the truth because we receive some new input. In the case of (d) we received the input at birth. In the case of (c), we gain a new understanding without having new information inputted to us.

(d) Purely innate knowledge — some people think that we are simply born knowing certain truths, or at least born with them somehow contained inside us so that we only need to think in the right way to become aware of them. In principle, innate knowledge could vary — I could know things innately that you do not.

(c) is the key category. It is different from (b) because a self-evident truth is not learned through any experience, even a non-physical one. It is different from (d) because it cannot vary between persons — a self-evident necessary truth is self-evident to any rational faculty that attends to it. What is self-evident does not depend on what inputs you have received.

I think the fundamental truths of ethics are necessary, self-evident truths. Jesus was not needed to tell us the fundamental truths of Stoicism. They are necessary, self-evident truths that any rational faculty can apprehend directly.

On the is-ought problem: you can run through all the descriptive observations you want. Here is data about the psychological consequences of rape for the victim. There is data about which societies have disapproved of rape under which circumstances. Go on making all the observations you want to make. But somewhere down the line you have to start making assertions like “it is wrong to harm other people just to get pleasure for yourself” or “pain is a dispreferred indifferent, and ceteris paribus one ought not to perform actions directed towards producing dispreferred indifferents” or something like that. At some point you have to bridge the is/ought gap. And you will not bridge it with any statement about what you can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. You can add up a million Premise 1s, but until you put in a non-sensory moral Premise 2, you will never get to a conclusion.

MORAL PROPERTIES CANNOT BE SENSED. That is the fulcrum.

Regards, Grant

Message Two: Support versus Connection — The Independence of Foundational Ethical Propositions

Grant C. Sterling to the Stoics Yahoo Group, June 5, 2017. Thread: “Re: Basic Stoic Ethical Principles.” Responding to questions about whether Stoic ethics requires Stoic theology.

There are (at least) two ways that philosophical principles can be related to one another — I will call them “support” and “connection”. They are very different things and should not be confused, as they often are.

Suppose that I discover that my wife is having an affair. I discover multiple occasions when she is not where she says she is going to be. I find a partially written love letter hidden in her belongings. So I come to believe that she is having an affair. Now suppose that a good female friend of mine confides that her husband Bubba is having an affair. She cites similar evidence. So I come to believe this as well. Then one day it occurs to me that my wife is good friends with this woman’s husband. After a while, I come to believe that my wife is having an affair with my friend’s husband.

Notice that neither of these two beliefs relies on the other in any logical sense. I came to have the two beliefs separately, based on entirely independent sets of evidence. We can imagine a sufficient amount of evidence to say that I would be fully justified in believing either of them without the other. We could imagine my discovering one day that my wife’s lover could not possibly be my friend’s husband, and this would not in the slightest change my belief that each of them was having an affair. At the same time, if the evidence in the two cases matches up very well, I have a fuller and better understanding of the universe by combining them.

On the other hand, imagine a very different situation. Suppose I come to believe that my wife is a reptilian space alien in disguise. Upon contemplating this further, I see that I must accept that reptilian space aliens exist, that they have studied humans for some time, that some sort of effective space travel must exist for them. These beliefs are not independent of my original belief — were I to discover that I was wrong about my wife’s alienhood I would immediately abandon all these other beliefs.

In the infidelity example, the beliefs were connected. Each makes perfect sense on its own. Each was discovered independently and independently supported by evidence. Yet they are related in a way that allows them to be combined into a coherent whole. In the alien example, the new beliefs are supporting beliefs — a foundation for the belief that she is an alien. If the foundation falls, everything built on it falls with it.

My contention is that the ethical beliefs of the ancient Stoics are related to their theological beliefs in the former way, and not the latter way. They believed certain things about ethics. They believed certain things about the gods. They then connected them together. But they did not hold their beliefs about ethics because of their theology, nor did they hold their theology because of their ethics. If you had somehow convinced Zeno that fiery pneuma was not in fact a material substance or that there was no conscious mind at the heart of the universe, I do not think that he would have abandoned his belief that virtue was good. There is no obvious logical connection between these ideas. Refute Stoic ethics and you will not have made the slightest dent in panentheism or materialism. Dissolve panentheism or materialism and you will not have refuted Stoic ethics. You will of course destroy the particular connections the ancient Stoics drew — just as if Bubba is not having an affair I will delete my belief that my wife is having an affair with Bubba — but you will not refute the connected doctrine.

Connecting beliefs can strengthen both, as in my example. If there is Reason at the heart of the universe, that can enhance the idea that Reason is vital to human life. If the perfect gods control all externals, that makes it easier for me to stop thinking that any external can be evil. But there is no reason why an atheist cannot articulate the same Stoic ethical principles that a monotheist affirms. And that is precisely what I do myself. I am a theist for reasons that have nothing to do with ethics. I am a Stoic for reasons that have nothing to do with theism. But of course I connect those two views. If you convinced me tomorrow that monotheism was false, I would not take that as evidence that my ethics or my epistemology were false.

I reject the call for grounding of ethical beliefs in theology. Ethics cannot be grounded in the will of God. The Euthyphro problem shows that — divine ethics ends up becoming either arbitrary (God, for no good reason, randomly assigns “good” to kindness and “bad” to cruelty — it would have been just as legitimate had he randomly picked the opposite), or else it ceases to be divine (God applauds kindness because it is good, which means that its goodness is antecedent logically to God’s approval). Furthermore, I have never met anyone who adopted basic ethical principles because of their theology. I have never met anyone who started disapproving of cheaters, liars, rapists, and thieves because he deduced the wrongness of those actions from his theology. There is no logical connection that I have ever seen — “it is wrong, ceteris paribus, to break a promise” seems to require only that I understand what promises are and how they work, not that I understand anything about God.

So I do not ground my ethics in my theology, and I do not see any need for me to do so.

The Stoics think that we already know (basically) what Virtue is, and we already know that it is good. What we need to do is start working at eliminating the desires that obscure our vision of the true good. Telling people to be good Boy Scouts misses the point. They already know that they ought to be doing those things, but their desires lead them astray. So you cannot get someone started on the road to eudaimonia without directly confronting them with the truth that externals are neither good nor evil.

Regards, Grant

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

These two messages together constitute the primary source material for Sterling’s foundationalist commitment. The January 2015 message establishes the epistemological taxonomy: self-evident necessary truths, known through rational perception (category c), are the foundational moral propositions. They are not learned from experience, not received through any input, and not variable between rational persons. Moral properties cannot be sensed; therefore moral foundations require non-sensory rational access. This is the precise epistemological claim that foundationalism makes in Sterling’s framework: Theorem 10 is a self-evident necessary truth, and the examination of impressions against it is an exercise of rational perception of self-evidence, not empirical inference.

The June 2017 message provides the structural claim: ethical beliefs and theological beliefs are connected, not mutually supporting. The six commitments — including the foundational value claim that virtue is the only genuine good — do not rest on ancient Stoic theology, cosmology, or physics. They stand independently. Dissolving ancient Stoic physics, as Inwood correctly observes is necessary, does not touch the foundational ethical propositions. Those propositions were not grounded in the physics. They were merely connected to it. The connections are severed by the reconstruction; the propositions remain.

Sources: Stoics Yahoo Group. “Re: Two (Types of) Moral Premises,” January 19, 2015; “Re: Basic Stoic Ethical Principles,” June 5, 2017. Author: Grant C. Sterling. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

Stoic News

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Stoicism, Politics, and the Best Form of Government — Grant C. Sterling

Stoicism, Politics, and the Best Form of Government — Grant C. Sterling

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

Message One: Stoicism and the Stoic Idea of the City — On Marx and the Stoics

Message Two: The Best Government for a Country of Non-Sages

Message Three: Popular Sovereignty as Myth — The Fascist Anarchist

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

The Stoic Relationship to Country

The Stoic Relationship to Country

I. The Question Stated

II. Country as a Social Relation Generating Role-Duties

III. Country as a Preferred Indifferent

IV. The Political Dimension: Sterling on Country and Virtue

V. Practical Civic Engagement

VI. The Structure Summarized

Friday, July 17, 2026

The Stoic Philosophical Training Method — Version 1.0

The Stoic Philosophical Training Method — Version 1.0

Governing Principle

Three Structural Constraints from the Source

Modes of Application

Phase One — Doctrinal Foundation

Phase Two — Apologetics

Phase Three — Technique, Attached to Belief

Phase Four — Standing Practice and Apologetics in the Moment

What This Method Is Not

Sterling Source Arguments for the Six Classical Philosophical Commitments

Sterling Source Arguments for the Six Classical Philosophical Commitments

C1 — Substance Dualism

C2 — Libertarian Free Will

C3 — Ethical Intuitionism

C4 — Foundationalism

C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth

C6 — Moral Realism

Free Will and Causation

Free Will and Causation

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

Message: Sterling on Chrysippus, Acts of Reason, and the Causal Nexus

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

Stoicism, Substance Dualism, and the Irreducibility of the Rational Faculty

Stoicism, Substance Dualism, and the Irreducibility of the Rational Faculty

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

Message One: A Brief Reply, Re: Dualism

Message Two: Stoic Dualism and “Nature”

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

Stoicism, Correspondence Theory of Truth, and Objective Moral Facts

Stoicism, Correspondence Theory of Truth, and Objective Moral Facts

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

Message One: Correspondence Is the Only Criterion of Truth

Message Two: Correspondence Theory and the Fundamental Ontological Category

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly

Stoicism, Foundationalism, and the Structure of Ethical Knowledge

Stoicism, Foundationalism, and the Structure of Ethical Knowledge

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

Message One: Two Types of Moral Premises — The Structure of Ethical Knowledge

Message Two: Support versus Connection — The Independence of Foundational Ethical Propositions

Corpus Note — Dave Kelly