Seneca on logic, rhetoric, & dialectic

What place could logic play in a conception of philosophy as spiritual direction, such as Ilsetraut Hadot assigns to Seneca?

We saw in the last entry how Seneca’s official position on the parts of philosophy is definitively orthodox — Stoically speaking. He assigns to logic its place as one of the three interconnected parts of philosophy. Moreover, Hadot notes that he subdivides it, “faithful to the Zenonian model, into the two parts of rhetoric and dialectic” (Letters 89, 17).

With that said, it is hardly possible to deny that, when it comes to the dedicated study of logic in Seneca, it “does not receive from him positive attention elsewhere”. Let’s look at how this “logic” is treated in Seneca, or at least in Hadot on Seneca, starting with some necessary framing considerations.

“Logic”

Firstly, we need to understand that the Greek term logike as a part of philosophy was wider than we presently accept. It included the study of syllogisms, most certainly, as well as the study of paradoxes which became famous (or infamous) in antiquity, which someone like the satirist Lucian of Samosata poked fun at.

But logic had a much wider sense, than our later modern use in the universities. To see why, it is worth remembering or stressing that the Greek word on which the idea is based, logos and the verb legein, had a far wider extension than our “logic”.