For logical relations were held to be relations among contents (the sayables) as abstracted from their material hosts.

when the Roman republic was looked to as a source of political ideas Seneca and his Stoicism took on exceptional interest.

Marcus finally invokes a key fact about human nature: we are built for cooperation within the family of rational beings.

The possible is what is capable of being true and is not prevented from being true by external factors.

The intellectual attraction of ancient Stoicism as we’ve come to understand it in modern academic study lies above all in its integration, in its vision of a way of life rooted in the use of reason to navigate life and fulfil our nature as human beings, in the context of the best available understanding of our place in the world.

proposed instead that a kind of life-giving breath (pneuma, later translated into Latin as spiritus) was the animating force in the world.

Forms had to be somehow distinct from the particulars they cause, and this distinctness came to be labelled ‘separation’. There is still a wide-ranging debate about what separation actually meant to Plato, but Aristotle, at least, saw it (along with the insufficiently explained notion of ‘participation’) as a fatal weakness in Platonic theory.

human nature is defined teleologically, in terms of its built-in purpose or function, and this function is fundamental to Stoic ethics.

it is in fact predetermined who will make this effort and whether it will succeed, but we don’t and can’t know who in particular will in fact try and whether he or she will succeed. If we knew this sort of thing then we might well be paralysed, not to mention depressed. But given the limits on human knowledge about these particulars we just carry o