The Stoics and the Meaning(s) of einai

Since Kahn’s influential 1973 The Verb to be in Ancient Greek, scholars of ancient philosophy have long puzzled over Greek uses of the verb “to be” (einai), notably in Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the Stoics. This article suggests that evidence from Stoic texts is relevant to these debates. Not only does it have the potential to affirm some of the scholarly views about einai, the Stoics themselves show awareness of its complexities in potentially surprising and revealing ways. For example, although they had developed the means to distinguish between syntactically complete and incomplete uses of einai, there is no evidence that they did. On the other hand, they may have tried to disambiguate between some uses of einai on semantic grounds, notably isolating and removing the so-called veridical sense as well as some existential valences. Similarly, they distinguished between universal and particular types of predicate statements, but not between identity and predicative esti statements, for reasons which I suggest are related to their wider philosophical commitments. The Stoics thus both contribute evidence supporting the distinctions drawn by scholars and make some of those very distinctions – and more - themselves.