The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals

In this paper I argue that some views on Stoicism held by authors like Proclus, Plutarch, or Alexander are misleading, mostly because either they take incorporeals to be secondary realities (bodies being the pri mary ones) or because they raise their objections to Stoic claims starting from quite a different conceptual scheme. Although the view that incorporeals are inferior realities would seem to be plausible, I shall endeavor to demonstrate that this sort of interpretation is not consistent with Stoic philosophy as a whole and that, accordingly,incorporeals can plausibly be thought to be of such a kind that they turn out to be essential in accounting for bodily things as well. I also suggest that bodies and incorporeals are complementary terms, i.e. bodies and incorporeals serve to complement each other in the sense that one cannot exist without the other.