The Stoic Reality: An Interview With Vanessa de Harven

Examining the Coherence and Unity of Stoicism’s Core Ideas

Image curtesy of Vanessa de Harven

I recently had the pleasure to speak at length with Vanessa de Harven, Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts, whose work in Stoic metaphysics is overturning assumptions about how the school conceptualised reality.

Our received understanding of Stoic ontology — theory of reality — is that it was cobbled t…