Word Finder - stoicism

definition

A school of philosophy popularized during the Roman Empire that emphasized reason as a means of understanding the natural state of things, or logos, and as a means of freeing oneself from emotional distress.

definition

A real or pretended indifference to pleasure or pain; insensibility; impassiveness.

Stoicism is a much more important system, but harder to classify.

Stoicism shown by our US colleagues.

This concrete side of moral philosophy came specially into evidence when Stoicism was transplanted to Rome.

Stoicism formulated a doctrine of providence or necessity.

Why no thoroughgoing attempt to apply Stoicism to Shakespeare has yet been undertaken is a mystery.

For his moral doctrine he borrowed freely from Stoicism.

In, 90 he was expelled with the other philosophers by Domitian, who was irritated by the support and encouragement which the opposition to his tyranny found amongst the adherents of Stoicism.

Logic is their word, and consciousness, impression and other technical words come to us, at least as technical words, from Roman Stoicism.

Both Cynics and Stoics agreed that the most important part of it was the knowledge that the sole good of man lay in this knowledge or wisdom Stoicism.

The two systems that have just been described were those that most prominently attracted the attention of the ancient world, so far as it was directed to ethics, from their Later almost simultaneous origin to the end of the 2nd Greek century A.D., when Stoicism almost vanishes from our philo- view.

And during the period of a century and a half between Antiochus and Plutarch, we may suppose the school to have maintained the old controversy with Stoicism on much the same ground, accepting the formula of " life according to nature," but demanding that the " good " of man should refer to his nature as a whole, the good of his rational part being the chief element, and always preferable in case of conflict, but yet not absolutely his sole good.

In Plutarch, however, we see the same tendencies of change that we have noticed in later Stoicism.

Such " psychological certainty " was denied by their agnostic opponents, and in the history of Stoicism we have apparently a modification of the doctrine of 4avra rta KaraXnirnici with a view to meet the critics, an approximation to a recognition that the primary conviction might meet with a counter-conviction, and must then persist undissipated in face of the challenge and in the last resort find verification in the haphazard instance, under varying conditions, in actual working.

A bastard Platonism through hostility to Stoicism may become agnostic. Stoicism through hostility to its sceptical critics may prefer to accept some of the positions of the dogmatic nihilist.

At the same time it is probable that the serene joys of virtue and the grieflessness which the sage was conceived to maintain amid the worst tortures, formed the main attractions of Stoicism for ordinary minds.

Young people may feel and need to show their sadness and to relinquish what can be a façade of stoicism when they are ill.

Incredibly, there is a view that Ms Lees ' admirable stoicism casts doubts over the entire case.

Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of steel.

Marcus is a remarkable young man and goes about his daily life with great stoicism.

Themes of adultery, passion and despair displayed as stiff upper lip stoicism with ne'er a peck on the cheek.

We look with awe and wonder at the courage they displayed and their stoicism in the face of six long years of conflict.

As a means to the realization of this ideal, Origen introduces the whole ethics of Stoicism.

He studied philosophy at Athens under various teachers, notably Antiochus of Ascalon, founder of the Old Academy, a combination of Stoicism, Platonism and Peripateticism.

As the first founder was of Phoenician descent, so he drew most of his adherents from the countries which were the seat of Hellenistic (as distinct from Hellenic) civilization; nor did Stoicism achieve its crowning triumph until it was brought to Rome, where the grave earnestness of the national character could appreciate its doctrine, and where for two centuries or more it was the creed, if not the philosophy, of all the best of the Romans.

It was Stoicism, not Platonism, that filled men's imaginations and exerted the wider and more active influence upon the ancient world at some of the busiest and most important times in all history.

Nevertheless, in some departments of theory, too, and notably in ethics and jurisprudence, Stoicism has dominated the thought of after ages to a degree not easy to exaggerate.

The common standpoint, the relation to contemporary or earlier systems, with all that goes to make up the character and spirit of Stoicism, can, fortunately, be more certainly established, and may with reason be attributed to the founder.

In Stoicism, for the moment, the two conceptions are united, soon, however, to diverge - the medical conception to receive its final development under Galen, while the philosophical conception, passing over to Philo and others, was shaped and modified at Alexandria under the influence of Judaism, whence it played a great part in the developments of Jewish and Christian theology.

The influence upon Stoicism of Heraclitus has been differently conceived.

The introduction of Stoicism at Rome was the most momentous of the many changes that it saw.

After the first sharp collision with the jealousy of the national authorities Stoicism in it found a ready acceptance, and made rapid progress Rome' amongst the noblest families.

This was a serious departure from the principles of the system, facilitating a return of later Stoicism to the dualism of God and the world, reason and the irrational part in man, which Chrysippus had striven to surmount.3 Yet in the general approximation and fusion of opposing views which had set in, the Stoics fared far better than rival schools.

In passing to Rome, Stoicism quitted the school for actual life.

Books of direction were written by Sextius in Greek (as afterwards by Seneca in Latin), almost the only Roman who had the ambition to found a sect, though in ethics he mainly followed Stoicism.

Seneca is the most prominent leader in the direction which Roman Stoicism now took.

Philo's doctrine is moulded by three forces - Platonism, Stoicism and Hebraism.

Christianity is essentially "Stoicism triumphant in a Jewish garb."

The ethical element in the " dark " philosophizing of Heraclitus (c. 530-470 B.C.), though it anticipates Stoicism in its conceptions of a law of the universe, to which the wise man will carefully conform, and a divine harmony, in the recognition of which he will find his truest satisfaction, is more profound, but even less systematic.

But they were 2 It has been suggestively said that Cynicism was to Stoicism what monasticism was to early Christianity.

The doctrine of conformity to Nature as the rule of conduct was not peculiar to Stoicism.

It is only by a later modification of Stoicism that cheerfulness or peace of mind is taken as the real ultimate end, to which the exercise of virtue is merely a means.

This paradox is violent, but it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Stoicism; and we are more startled to find that the Epicurean sage, no less than the Stoic, is to be happy even on the rack; that his happiness, too, is unimpaired by being restricted in duration, when his mind has apprehended the natural limits of life; that, in short, Epicurus makes no less strenuous efforts than Zeno to eliminate imperfection from the conditions of human existence.

The sense of the gap between theory and fact gives to the religious element of Stoicism a new force; the soul, conscious of its weakness, leans on the thought of God, and in the philosopher's attitude towards external events, pious resignation preponderates over self-poised indifference; the old self-reliance of the reason, looking down on man's natural life as a mere field for its exercise, makes room for a positive aversion to the flesh as an alien element imprisoning the spirit; the body has come to be a " corpse which the soul sustains," 1 and life a " sojourn in a strange land "; 2 in short, the ethical idealism of Zeno has begun to borrow from the metaphysical idealism of Plato.

But however Oriental may have been the cast of mind that welcomed this theosophic asceticism, the forms of thought by which these views were philosophically reached are essentially Greek; and it is by a thoroughly intelligible process of natural development, in which the intensification of the moral consciousness represented by Stoicism plays an important part, that the Hellenic pursuit of knowledge culminates in a preparation for ecstasy, and the Hellenic idealization of man's natural life ends in a settled antipathy to the body and its works.

Indeed, this recognition in later Stoicism is sometimes expressed with so much warmth of feeling as to be hardly distinguishable from Christian philanthropy.

The uncompromising mysticism of this view may be at once compared and contrasted with the philosophical severity of Stoicism.

Yet the stiffest female Stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of steel.

Marcus is a remarkable young man and goes about his daily life with great Stoicism.

Themes of adultery, passion and despair displayed as stiff upper lip Stoicism with ne'er a peck on the cheek.

The same pressure brought forth a great many vernacular translations and new editions of the principal sources of Stoicism.