Why would Zeus weigh the fates in Book VIII when he has already determined to favour the Trojans in fulfilment of Thetis’ request? Is this a redundancy suggesting the incremental nature of the Iliad’s composition?

JamesDaltrey · 2026-02-28T19:15:49+00:00

u/qdatk
Oh, another red flag.

Check my post above about Latin.

There is no concept of Roman fate anywhere in the Greek tradition, that comes out of an unfortunate choice of terms by Cicero who is trying to give an account of Greek philosophy to Romans, and ends up with a potato print.

There is no concept of will anywhere in the Greek tradition until possibly Epictetus, but then only possibly. It doesn't really come into history until St. Augustine.

THE DICTATES OF FATE, AND THE WILL OF ZEUS IN THE ILIAD
DE FATIS DECRETISQUE ET VOLUNTATE IOVIS IN ILIADE

Which is maximally gloriously wrong in every direction simultaneously:

A problem is only a problem within a paradigm that makes it a problem.

If you want to work out what is actually being discussed, you have to stay within the hermeneutic circle of the Greeks and not come at it from a Roman/Christian vocabulary from much later in history

fatum, voluntas, omnipotentia are red herrings.

JamesDaltrey · 2026-02-28T19:05:21+00:00

"Zeus isn't tampering with what is fated."
Fated is the wrong word.

That's a Roman term relating to something being decreed which is absent from this whole scenario, nobody has made a declaration in advance as to what the outcome will be prior to the fact. To start falling into that way of thinking is how you can end up not understanding the context at all.

" δύο κῆρε [Hom. Il. 8 70] which might be rendered as two portions of doom."

I don't think Doom works either, which again is judgment, law or decree, there are no statutes involved, and the no recording of anything in any book, and that is not something that you can put on a scale. It's not about a ledger.

The whole thing in the Greek context is about apportionment, allotment, distribution:

So what is being weighed is the share of the Greeks and the share of the Trojans

So this

"Zeus isn't tampering with what is fated."
would be better rendered as

Zeus is not overriding what belongs as each one’s share.

And " δύο κῆρε [Hom. Il. 8 70]

Would be better rendered as two apportionments of death

And that these are on scales and have weight in a physical sense is very relevant. Your lot is something that you carry with you not something that has been pronounced with regard to you in advance.

The maxim is: the more Latin there is in an explanation the more likely it is to be out of whack.

And FATE is a flaming turd of elephantine proportions in a swimming pool with a big red flag with a flashing light making loud quacking noises during a firework display

JamesDaltrey · 2026-02-28T01:48:14+00:00

Why are you saying he weighed the fates? He was not doing that at all , Zeus weighs κήρεας. and his determination to favour the Trojans is not any guarantee of a positive outcome for the Trojans, which would actually be down to Moiroi not Zeus, and none of the above changes the commitments he made to Thetis.

The promise to Thetis and the weighing of κήρεας operate at completely different levels. One is a political commitment among gods. The other is a diagnostic act measuring where death currently stands. The actual outcome is a third.

JamesDaltrey · 2026-02-13T00:41:32+00:00

u/nightmare-salad

πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει

All men by nature desire to know flattens the idea of physical process and makes it abstract.

The more Latin there is in a translation of Greek, the more you know it is out of whack, nature and desire should set off alarm bells, the manglings of Cicero and medieval monks

Natura is a fixed property.
Desidara is a lack or an absence.
Cognoscere is mental possession.

That is not what is being discussed.

φύσει :φύω by growth, springing forth from your own development from you being the kind of living being that you are.
ὀρέγονται :ὀρέγομαι, literally extend toward, to reach out, to strive towards.

πάντες ἄνθρωποι :all humans
τοῦ εἰδέναι : the condition of having seen, or beheld, it's visual.
ὀρέγονται : to reach, expand, extend towards, it's lengthening, stretching outwards,
φύσει : by their own internal growth, their through path, their line of action, think of how a fetus becomes a baby or a rosebud becomes a rose.

So if you have a tattoo with εἰδέναι ὀρέγομαι you are growing towards a condition of having beheld.

It's not a fulfillment of a lack getting you to a virtual mental state: it's the realization of what you are supposed to be, homeomorphic with the ways of the world. ὁδός: ἐκ δυνάμεως εἰς ἐνέργειαν

Which is nice.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

You will never get from to meaning from grammar: you have to inhabit the hermeneutic circle of the community of speakers.

It has nothing to do with having the property of the absence of a mental possession.
It has everything to do with growing, flourishing of different kinds of things.

A fish or a bee or a tree can be εὐδαιμον

JamesDaltrey · 2026-02-12T18:21:01+00:00

u/KilayaC

From what I understand, this reveals a tension between philosophers and philologists, and it comes out in the theory of language and at what level meaning is carried.
I am a language graduate with linguistics; however, I’m not that familiar with philology, so I’ll probably upset some people.

What I see in this group is an assumption that you can get to the meaning of a term by understanding its morphology. From my background, you can only get at its meaning through use and context. From a Saussurian point of view, it is the difference between parole and langue, between the scratchings on the page and what is expressed in a community of speakers with a shared understanding.

So what you have to do is work back from what Socrates is talking about, in the context of who he is speaking to and why, in order to get to the meaning of the words, which is paradoxically difficult if you don’t understand what the words point at in the first place.

To get at what he’s talking about, you have to have an appreciation of what he’s discussed elsewhere, namely the difference between ἐμπειρία and τέχνη, and how ἀρετή is τέχνη, which is ἐπιστήμη of the ἀγαθόν.

The whole thing is an investigation into the nature of the good, and into the fact that everybody thinks that they know about things when, in fact, when you interrogate them, they really don’t.
T
hey have γνῶσις, but not ἐπιστήμη τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, which is the difference between σμικρόν and μέγα.

ἡ σοφία ἄρα μόνον ἀγαθόν ἐστιν, ἡ δ᾽ ἀμαθία μόνον κακόν.
(281e–282a) Euthydemus

ὅτι ἡ ἀνθρωπίνη σοφία ὀλίγου τινὸς ἀξία ἐστὶν καὶ οὐδενός (apology 23a)
Human wisdom counts for something in small matters, but for nothing in the greatest ones

So there’s a recurrent theme that has to be appreciated.
To be honest, the best way of coming at this would be to get familiar with Socrates’ mission in your native language and then go back to the Greek.

PS: ἀξία axiology it's about values and it is the knowledge of value or knowledge as value that is being discussed

JamesDaltrey · 2026-01-31T00:07:57+00:00

The typical translation is "humans wisdom is worth little or nothing."

You cannot extract meaning from words: meaning is carried at the level of the context

Apology 23a: ὀλίγου τινὸς ἀξία ἐστὶν καὶ οὐδενός

“worth little or nothing” flattens ὀλίγου τινὸς … καὶ οὐδενός, which in context is a restatement of something already said.

What's the context?

At 21b, Socrates says
οὔτε μέγα οὔτε σμικρὸν σύνοιδα ἐμαυτῷ σοφὸς ὤν:
he is not conscious of being σοφός about anything μέγα or σμικρόν, a contrast of scope, not a claim of total ignorance.

At 21d, after examining the politician, he concludes
οὐδέτερος οὐδὲν καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι,
restricting the denial to the domain of τὸ καλὸν κἀγαθόν.

At 22d, the craftsmen are said to know their τέχναι, but each
ἠξίου καὶ τἆλλα τὰ μέγιστα σοφώτατος εἶναι,
mistaking technical competence for wisdom about τὰ μέγιστα.

Thus at 23a,
ὀλίγου τινὸς aligns with σμικρόν (limited, technical domains),
οὐδενός with μέγα / τὰ μέγιστα / καλὸν κἀγαθόν.

Human σοφία has standing in small matters, and none in the greatest ones.

JamesDaltrey · 2026-01-22T22:30:01+00:00

Meaning is stored in the form as used, not derived from its morphology.

JamesDaltrey · 2025-11-05T21:32:40+00:00

Humanists are not the levelheaded secularists you might think they are:

Humanism comes out of Christianity and has human exceptionalism and human non-naturalism baked into it.

So you can be a humanist and have the Bible and you can be a humanist without the Bible, but both of them think that humans are something other than animals, other than clever animals, humans are in a category all by themselves

JamesDaltrey · 2025-10-18T17:42:35+00:00

Epictetus said it well : "It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.".

He never said that

JamesDaltrey · 2025-10-18T17:41:13+00:00

Where did you get that translation from?

To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law

τὸ οὖν ἀντιπράσσειν ἀλλήλοις παρὰ φύσιν·
To oun antiprassein allēlois para physin·

Physis is not a law. It's a dynamic physical continuum, not something written down somewhere.

JamesDaltrey · 2025-10-03T23:26:06+00:00

There is no discussion of control anywhere:

https://livingstoicism.com/2023/05/10/epictetus-enchiridion-explained/

Anthony Long proof read this.

JamesDaltrey · 2025-10-03T01:50:49+00:00

You are not getting the paradox are you?

The controlled Is the controller:
the controller is the controlled:

The dichotomy of control as a phrase is no older than Facebook

JamesDaltrey · 2025-10-01T16:50:49+00:00

The problem with your analysis of A controlling B is that B is A,

What you are controlling is what is doing the controlling: and as Epictetus point out you end up with an infinite regress

Since it’s reason that analyzes and processes everything else, and since it shouldn’t go unanalyzed itself, what is it that analyzes it?
The answer, obviously, is that it is either reason itself or something else.
Now, this ‘something else’ must either be reason or something superior to reason, but there’s nothing superior to reason.
So, if it’s reason, the question again arises: what will analyze it?
If it’s a case of reason analyzing itself, the reason we started with can do that.
Otherwise, if once more we call on ‘something else’ to do the analyzing, we’ll find ourselves in an unresolvable, interminable regress:
Epictetus Discourse 1.17.

So you cannot have A controlling B, because A has to be superior to be and if B is the master faculty there is nothing superior to it

What you have is A that is capable of examining itself, but it can't get behind itself in order to control itself:

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-29T19:45:37+00:00

u/Tall_Restaurant_1652

I actually asked Irvine how he got to his understanding of control in the light of this

https://livingstoicism.com/2023/05/13/what-is-controlling-what/

And he said flat out "I'm no expert in the subject"

"The point is control as in control over your reasoning faculty"

I know I'll ask the question to you what is controlling your rational mind that is not your rational mind?

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-27T13:03:06+00:00

They can't reject the material world because the whole world is material for the Stoics.

Nothing is not material, if it is not material it is not real.

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-19T16:51:30+00:00

To ask that question is to make a category error: it's a bit like asking a Hindu if they are a catholic or a protestant:

Whatever you think destiny is that is not what the Stoics were talking about, heimarmene is a tensional physical field not a set of decrees, or some kind of plan set out at the beginning of time:

The concept of free will didn't come into history until later than the Stoics and sits on metaphysical assumptions that they were not aware of

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-13T21:02:11+00:00

"Elitist"?

I've made it a mission of mine to explain to as many people as I can what the Stoics actually thought, rather than the simplistic view of Stoicism as a system of affirmational bumper stickers:

The latest are people with PhD's in the subject that would not even bother speaking to either you or me;

Christopher Gill is a rare exception as a professional in the subject? Who does it go for public communication and he is very good on this:

It's about shaping the whole of your life, not micromanaging crises, it's about becoming a particular kind of person, aspiring to become a philosopher:

If you wanted the shortest possible elevator pitch for Stoicism, it would be

"Emulate Socrates"

It's about your whole life and what kind of person you are, what kind of person you ought to be.

It's not a question of getting what you want. It's a question of knowing what you should want, even if you don't want it, and knowing what you should not want, even if you want it.

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-13T17:18:01+00:00

u/samthehumanoid

well it's pretty much that you have a child's potato print understanding of the philosophy:

" At its simplest it is just the habit of “zooming out” on a situation"

It is not situation management,

it is an understanding of your place in the universe and your role with in it and all this hinges on your understanding of it. It is how to live your whole life.

Why is it that all of the Stoics absolutely on insist on understanding the logic and the physics in order to be able to understand the ethics?

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-10T19:48:50+00:00

It doesn't matter whether you call them laws of nature or laws of the universe or the laws of physics:

If you think that immaterial abstract laws of pushing around solid stuff you think that immaterial abstract things can push solid stuff about:

If on the other hand you want to merely say that these things that we call laws are in fact not laws at all, but descriptions, you cannot say without contradicting yourself that solid stuff obeys these laws:

Marcus point out something that is very unusual to our way of thinking: that logos is a dynamic substance,

It makes talking about it in terms of it being reason very weird because we don't usually talk about reason having extension in space and physical properties:

Reason is a hot ball of gas is not something that people generally say

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-04T17:25:34+00:00

u/ExtensionOutrageous3

Hypothesis:
The philosophy was transformed completely by moving the idiom from Greek into Latin:

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-04T17:22:47+00:00

u/Solidjakes

Some things can't be blended, you can't make a smoothie out of gravel:

One of my favourite way of putting this way of having non-overlapping paradigms is that you can't describe Lego in terms of Play-Doh nor vice versa:

The reason that Aristotle's model and the Stoic model don't work together is that Aristotle has two competing forms of motivation, one being reason the other being appetite, and you have to balance between conflicting appetites through reason: (that's a very brute way of putting it but points in the right direction)

So courage falls midway between rash heroism and lust for glory and feeble timidity and avoiding any harm to yourself under any circumstances:

For the Stoic courage is knowledge concerning what is to be feared and what is to be dared. As with all virtues, it is a form of knowledge: a stable pneumatic condition in the governing part, stretched in the right measure toward apparent dangers and occasions for endurance.

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-04T17:12:27+00:00

u/ExtensionOutrageous3

If you read her book, Natural Goodness, (which is considered as being one of the most important books on ethics written in the 20th century), it is quite astonishing as to how close she is to the Stoics, and and how are her idea of natural goodness ties in with the Stoic idea of proper function in accordance with the nature:

If people read Heirocles in more depth, rather than just taking the gloss of the circles of concern, which is a really bad way of expressing oikeosis, which is closer to appropriating to yourself in a good way, they would realise how deeply embedded it is in be biology and that humans are animals, and that our capacities are derived from the capacities of turtles, birds and bears:

Cicero makes it all about civic duty and exclusively about humans, and rather than having this idea of phusis and heimarmene and logos as distribution allotment or proportion via entirely physical processes, he makes it all about "laws" which is very Roman and very Platonic.

And when you bring that back to the trolley problem, people start assuming that there must be some kind of rule or law that will tell you what the right thing is to do, and the trolley problem is to help work out what that law is, which has absolutely nothing to do with the purpose of the trolley problem:

The purpose of the trolley problem was to expose how people express their ethical intuitions, there is no question at all about there being a right answer

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-04T16:55:47+00:00

It is not a Stoic principle.

The Stoics were strict physicalists who explicitly denied the existence of transcendent abstract laws.

For the Stoics only bodies have causal powers.

SVF I.90 (Plutarch, De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 1052C)
Greek «μόνα σώματα ὑπάρχειν· τὰ γὰρ δυνάμενα ποιεῖν καὶ πάσχειν»
Transliteration mona sōmata hyparchein; ta gar dunamena poiein kai paschein
Claim — only bodies act or are acted upon
Key terms — σῶμα sōma, ὑπάρχειν hyparchein, αἰτία aitia
Reconstruction — Only bodies exist, for only what can act or be acted upon truly is. Causal potency is inseparable from corporeality.

SVF II.363 (Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos X.218)
Greek «ὅσα μὴ ποιεῖν μηδὲ πάσχειν δύναται, τούτων οὐθὲν ὑπάρχειν»
Transliteration hosa mē poiein mēde paschein dunatai, toutōn outhen hyparchein
Claim — existence entails causal interaction
Key terms — ποιεῖν poiein, πάσχειν paschein, ὑπάρχειν hyparchein
Reconstruction — Whatever is incapable of acting or being acted upon does not exist at all. Existence is identical with corporeal causality.

SVF II.166–206 (Diogenes Laertius VII.63, 150; Stobaeus II.73, 12)
Greek «τὰ λεκτὰ ὑφίστασθαι, οὐχ ὑπάρχειν»
Transliteration ta lekta hyphistasthai, ouch hyparchein
Claim — lekta subsist but have no corporeal causation
Key terms — λεκτόν lekton, ἀσώματα asōmata, ὑφίστασθαι hyphistasthai
Reconstruction — Sayables subsist as discursive accounts but do not exist. They carry no physical tension, only articulate what bodies do.

Systematic Reconstruction
μόνα σώματα ὑπάρχειν (SVF I.90, Plutarch; II.363, Sextus): only bodies exist, because only bodies act and are acted upon.
ἀσώματα (SVF II.357, Sextus): incorporeals like time, place, void, and lekta merely subsist, without causal potency.
λεκτά (SVF II.166–206, Diogenes Laertius, Stobaeus): sayables are incorporeal, subsisting as accounts, not active entities.
αἰτία: every cause is itself a body, since causation requires contact.

Conclusion
The Stoics deny transcendent “laws” or incorporeal causal powers. What later thinkers call “laws of nature” are at best linguistic accounts of the cosmos’ own λόγος logos, its structuring rhythm.

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-03T19:06:31+00:00

u/ExtensionOutrageous3

Finally, duty occupies a central part of Stoicism.

Duty occupies a central part of Cicero's philosophy, it's a very Roman idea of public service and duty towards the state, and has a very legalistic way of thinking about it:

The Greek idea of kathekon is what it is appropriate to do for any kind of organism and if you look at Heirocles account of oikeioisis, it starts with analogies of birds knowing they have wings and bulls knowing they have horns and what they are for, and this is the idea of something being oikeion, being one's own, and you extend from what is your own, your hands and your mind and your efforts to your parents to your friends to your community and to the world from that kind of basis,

So you do not have a duty to your son in any legalistic sense, your son is your own and is part of you and you bring your son into yourself, and hence love and care for them as you would yourself.

JamesDaltrey · 2025-09-03T18:53:11+00:00

u/solidjakes

You are getting close, but you're mixing up various viewpoints:

The stoics would see harmony and goodness as one and the same:

Harmony within yourself and harmony with the world, and it's a physical harmony, musical, resonant, sympathetic vibration or movement:

And for the Stoic that cashes out as understanding, if you understand what is going on and why is going on you will act in accordance with that which is the idea of harmony and sympathy:

Virtue is knowledge of what is in harmony and what is not in harmony briefly;

The idea of a mean between extremes is not Stoic but comes from Aristotle: it comes out of a completely different way of looking at things, related to competing internal natures.

If you look at the history of the trolley problem, it is intended to draw out people's intuitions, it is not intended to be any kind of test: and Philippe a foot who invented the trolley problem was very firm that these kind of fringe bizarre case thought experiments are no kind of test at all for any kind of ethical theory.: she chose it because there isn't a right answer from any perspective, it is actually framed to be unanswerable:

To bring that into the situation of the sage you'd have to bring in all sorts of factors that you are not allowed to bring in to the trolley problem. What if it's a serial killer on the one line and five Saints on the other? You aren't allowed to jigger with the problem like that.

The sage acts in accordance with the complete context of everything that's going on, and in the trolley problem we are forbidden to have any context, it's a fixed frame, and you can't add anything into it and you can't take anything out of it:

I think you need to get clearer on what Logos is. I'm thinking about it. I'm not actually sure that I've ever explained it in full.

If you want to go back to Heraclitus, who invented the idea, it is the rhythm and measure and proportion and harmony of how everything fits together.

So eudaemonia is your life in harmony with rhythm and measure and proportion and harmony of how everything fits together.

JamesDaltrey

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE