The structured self in Hellenistic and Roman thought

New York: Oxford University Press (2006)
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Abstract

Christopher Gill offers a new analysis of what is innovative in Hellenistic--especially Stoic and Epicurean--philosophical thinking about selfhood and personality. His wide-ranging discussion of Stoic and Epicurean ideas is illustrated by a more detailed examination of the Stoic theory of the passions and a new account of the history of this theory. His study also tackles issues about the historical study of selfhood and the relationship between philosophy and literature, especially the presentation of the collapse of character in Plutrarch's Lives, Senecan tragedy, and Virgil's Aeneid. As all Greek and Latin is translated, this book presents original ideas about ancient concepts of personality to a wide range of readers.

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Chapters

Psychophysical Holism in Stoicism and Epicureanism

This chapter identifies, as a key innovative feature of Hellenistic thought about personality, the idea of the person as a psychophysical unit or whole in Stoicism and Epicureanism. It contrasts this idea with the core-centred or part-based view of the personality sometimes found in Plato ... see more

Psychological Holism and Socratic Ideals

This chapter identifies the combination of radical (Socratic) ethical claims and psychological holism as a second distinctive feature of Stoic and Epicurean thought about the self. The main ethical claims are that all human beings can achieve happiness by rational reflection and virtue, th... see more

Development and the Structured Self

This chapter charts links between the Stoic and Epicurean conception of self that is discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 (the structured self), and their ideas about ethical development. Human beings, while seen as psychophysical and psychological wholes, are also seen as constitutively capable ... see more

Competing Readings of Stoic Passions

Stoics and Epicureans, while holding that all human beings are constitutively capable of achieving a fully coherent state of character, also maintain that failure to realize this capacity results in a radically un-structured and incoherent state of personality. This chapter examines the St... see more

Competing Readings of Platonic Psychology

In Hellenistic-Roman debate about psychology, thinkers such as Plutarch and Galen saw themselves as maintaining Platonic (and Aristotelian) ideas about psychology that the Stoics rejected. This chapter suggests that the relationship between Plato and these Hellenistic and Roman thinkers is... see more

Issues in Selfhood: Subjectivity and Objectivity

This chapter challenges the rather common view that Hellenistic-Roman thought shows a shift towards a more subjective and individualistic conception of self. It argues that this period expresses an ‘objective-participant’ conception, like that of Classical Greece. The account of self-knowl... see more

Literary Reception: Structured and Unstructured Selves

This chapter explores the potential relevance to the interpretation of later Greek and Roman literature of the competing Hellenistic-Roman patterns of thought about the development of character (and about the consequences of failure to develop properly) discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. The p... see more

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