Abstract

According to the Stoics, the psychology of adult human beings is unified in a striking sense: each of the soul's perceptive, discursive, and motivational functions belongs to the single faculty of reason. Reason, in turn, is constituted by a set of conceptions (ennoiai) and preconceptions (prolêpseis) acquired on the basis of experience. The few secure sources that bear on this theory in the early Stoa suggest that certain of these empirically acquired conceptions function, somehow, as a criterion of truth in human perception and rational cognition generally. The conceptions associated with this cognitive role are sometimes said to be shared or common (koinai).These tenuous but intriguing claims are the focus of ..