ABSTRACT
Snippets of Stoic doctrine were available in a large number of ancient writings, and could inspire or be integrated into scholastic theory. As an attitude to doing philosophy, Stoicism is everywhere in the late Middle Ages. The Stoics divided the total realm of thinkables into somethings and nothings. Universal concepts were considered nothings. Somethings comprised things-that-are and things-that-are-not, the former being corporeal, the latter incorporeal. To the Stoics the art of language had only two species, rhetoric and dialectic, the latter consisting of a part dealing with things that signify, and one dealing with things signified. The scholastic terms can be traced back to Boethius, and, with a little bit of goodwill, to Cicero, and thus to a time when it would be natural for such fragments of Stoic logic to have survived. The old Stoics and at least some scholastics also share a predilection for outrageous, paradoxical theses.
