Back matter

We start with some new books on Stoicism.Vanessa de Harven's The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics is a significant contribution to our understanding of the school's conception of the basic structure of things.1 Her aim is to show that the Stoics have a unified metaphysical account in the sense that they provide a 'one-world metaphysics': all 'somethings' (tina) can be placed in a structure according to which all of those somethings either are bodies (things that 'are') or are dependent on or grounded in the things that 'are' .This second class will include the somethings that 'subsist': incorporeals (place and void, time, lekta, limits) and things that are neither corporeal nor incorporeal (fictional things like centaurs).And that is all.Her account takes us through the furniture of the Stoics' metaphysical picture, based in part on an innovative account of their reading of and reaction to the discussion with the Giants in Plato's Sophist, from the fundamental principles, on to other bodies, via the Stoic 'Categories' , through incorporeals, to other 'somethings' like limits and fictional entities.Readers will want to look in detail at the different topics to determine whether they all provide plausible stories about the way in which things that are not bodies are 'grounded' in thing that are.For example, de Harven insists that lekta are mind-dependent and therefore grounded in the bodies that are 1 V.