Anthropological Aspects of the Proper Name in the Logic of the Early Stoics

The article analyzes the conceptual-theoretical and historical-anthropological features of the proper name in the philosophy of the Early Stoics. The problem of the genesis of the proper name is a milestone in the historical and cultural discourse of ancient philosophy. It affects both the logical and anthropological issues. Although the Stoics were interested in concepts and predicates, names and notions, the status of proper names remains unclear. This article bridges the formal and semantic gaps in the Stoic doctrine. Since this is a study of the logic of the development of philosophical knowledge concerning the very subject of the history of philosophy, the principle of the unity of the logical and the historical is used. The interpretation of concepts, terms, and theories requires applying a hermeneutic method owing to fragmented sources based on the evidence of later commentators. The proper name is considered to be part of logic, within which the Stoics were first to state the difference between proper and common names. The division of logic into dialectics and rhetoric and the further division of dialectics by spheres of thing, lekton, and sign illustrate the formal approach of the Stoics to the language. On the one hand, the name refers to an incomplete lekton, it is cogitable objectivity; plus, the name is incorporeal, which means that it is neither truth, nor knowledge. On the other hand, the name, being a condition (as cogitable objectivity), can correlate with its opposite. But, unlike predicates, concepts, and common nouns, proper names do not have such a quality. Predicates and propositions convey the connection between things, i.e. purely incorporeal liaison, while proper names connect a thing and a thought about that thing, i.e. the corporeal with the incorporeal. Therefore, the proper name does not completely coincide with lek-ton, it has a different substance. The name is associated with "pure sense" only technically. It confronts predicates which express event-driven nomadic structures of the language. The proper name, on the contrary, constitutes a stable constellation, a peculiar char-acterology of the subject and it marks his/her distinction. As a result, name ontology is designed through the relation to both the corporeal and the incorporeal; it is the Stoic "truth", subjective "telos", and the zero-point sense layer, a kind of pre-sense. All this allows claiming that the name desacralization process began in antiquity.

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