Stoicism
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008)
Abstract
Stoicism was one of the new philosophical movements of the Hellenistic period. The name derives from the porch (stoa poikilê) in the Agora at Athens decorated with mural paintings, where the members of the school congregated, and their lectures were held. Unlike ‘epicurean,’ the sense of the English adjective ‘stoical’ is not utterly misleading with regard to its philosophical origins. The Stoics did, in fact, hold that emotions like fear or envy (or impassioned sexual attachments, or passionate love of anything whatsoever) either were, or arose from, false judgements and that the sage—a person who had attained moral and intellectual perfection—would not undergo them. The later Stoics of Roman Imperial times, Seneca and Epictetus, emphasise the doctrines (already central to the early Stoics' teachings) that the sage is utterly immune to misfortune and that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Our phrase ‘stoic calm’ perhaps encapsulates the general drift of these claims. It does not, however, hint at the even more radical ethical views which the Stoics defended, e.g. that only the sage is free while all others are slaves, or that all those who are morally vicious are equally so. Though it seems clear that some Stoics took a kind of perverse joy in advocating views which seem so at odds with common sense, they did not do so simply to shock. Stoic ethics achieves a certain plausibility within the context of their physical theory and psychology, and within the framework of Greek ethical theory as that was handed down to them from Plato and Aristotle. It seems that they were well aware of the mutually interdependent nature of their philosophical views, likening philosophy itself to a living animal in which logic is bones and sinews; ethics and physics, the flesh and the soul respectively (another version reverses this assignment, making ethics the..Author's Profile
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Citations of this work
Stoicism (as Emotional Compression) Is Emotional Labor.Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò - 2020 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 6 (2).
Free Will and the Bounds of the Self.Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols - 2011 - In Robert Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford University Press.
Buddhism and Scepticism: Historical, Philosophical, and Comparative Perspectives.Oren Hanner (ed.) - 2020 - Freiburg/Bochum: ProjektVerlag.
References found in this work
Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy From Socrates to Plotinus.John Madison Cooper - 2012 - Princeton University Press.
Frege plagiarized the Stoics.Susanne Bobzien - 2021 - In Fiona Leigh (ed.), Themes in Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic Philosophy, Keeling Lectures 2011-2018. University of Chicago Press. pp. 149-206.
A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought.Michael Frede - 2011 - University of California Press.