Stoic sources, can be discerned also in the Meditations.
Chrysippus and his followers had divided knowledge into
three areas: logic, physics and ethics, concerned,
respectively, with the nature of knowledge, the structure of
the physical world and the proper role of human beings in
that world. Marcus pays lip service to this triadic division in
at least one entry (8.13), but it is clear from other chapters
and from the Meditations as a whole that logic and physics
were not his focus. Among the things for which he thanks the
gods is that he was never “absorbed by logic-chopping, or
preoccupied by physics” (1.17). Occasional entries show an
awareness of Stoic thought about language (the etymological
pun in 8.57 is perhaps the clearest example), but they are the
exception, not the rule. In many cases Marcus’s logic is weak
—the logic of the rhetorician, not of the philosopher; it is
rare to find a developed chain of reasoning like that in
Meditations 4.4. His interest in the nature of the physical
world is limited to its relevance to human problems. About
one of the basic Stoic physical doctrines—the notion of the
periodic conflagration (ekpyrosis) that ends a cosmic cycle
—Marcus adopts an agnostic position (though he was not
alone in this). To him it was ethics that was the basis of the
system: “just because you’ve abandoned your hopes of
becoming a great thinker or scientist, don’t give up on
attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others.. .”
(7.67).