NDPR Vanessa de Harven The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics: Everything is Something

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.12.7 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Vanessa de Harven, The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics: Everything is Something, Oxford University Press, 2025, 560pp, $175.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198930167.

Reviewed by Reier Helle, Harvard University

The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics is a sweepingly ambitious book, aimed at setting out and defending a full account of the ontology and metaphysics of the early Greek Stoics. Vanessa De Harven (VDH) argues that the Stoics have a tripartite ontology, in which the highest genus—something (ti)—comprises bodies, incorporeals, and what is neither corporeal nor incorporeal, and which is unified by the grounding of non-bodily somethings in bodies. The Stoics come out as principled non-reductive physicalists with a cohesive ontology, defying its jumbled appearance in the sources. The argument is given in five sections: ‘Something’, ‘Bodies’, ‘Incorporeals’, ‘Neither Corporeal nor...