The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
When
"
"
"
LOGIC: THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 65
specially as a detector of error "as a prophylactic
against the deceitfulness of arguments and the plausi
bility of language."
This is a point of view of very
great importance and logicians have again awakened,
;
though only recently, to the full significance of it.
one of those who were present said [to
Epictetus], l Persuade me that logic is necessary, he
answered, Do you wish me to prove this to you ?
Yes. Then, must I needs prove it dialectically ? He
admitted. How, then, will you know if I am imposing
on <re
you by sophistic arguments (av ?
o-o<urw/x<u)
*
The man was silent. You see, then, he said, that you
are yourself admitting that logic is necessary, if without
it
you cannot know even as much as this, whether logic
is
necessary or not necessary (Diss. ii. 25).
The other point is the doctrine that words and
thoughts are the same thing, only looked at from
different sides a second note of modernity that is
extremely striking, anticipative
of Max Muller and
his followers. This led the Stoics to their famous
distinction of inward reason and embodied reason
or "speech" (Aoyos eVSiafcros and Aoyos 7rpo<o/HKo s),
a distinction that played a great part in the Juda^o-
Hellenistic thought of Alexandria in the first century
B.C., as seen in Philo Judaeus ; one, too, that seems
to have influenced the Christian conception of the
Divine Logos, as given in the prologue of the Gospel
of St. John ("in the beginning was the Logos . .
and the Logos was made flesh "),*
and that was re-
1 The Stoics, however, in their doctrine of logos were influenced
by Heracleitus, who belonged to Ephesus, where also (according
to tradition) St. John wrote his Gospel,
5