Word Finder - stoics

definition

Proponent of stoicism, a school of thought, from in 300 B.C.E. up to about the time of Marcus Aurelius, who holds that by cultivating an understanding of the logos, or natural law, one can be free of suffering.

definition

A person indifferent to pleasure or pain.

The Stoics were not agreed upon the question.

God is the soul of the world, although the gods of popular belief are (at least by the later Stoics) respectfully if exoterically acknowledged.

In the cosmology of the Stoics we have the germ of a monistic and pantheistic conception of evolution.

The necessity in the world's order is regarded by the Stoics as identical with the divine reason, and this idea is used as the basis of a teleological and optimistic view of nature.

We may also observe here that, like Epictetus, he is by no means so decided on the subject of suicide as the older Stoics.

The importance of these principles lies not only in their intrinsic value as an ethical system, but also in the fact that they form the link between Socrates and the Stoics, between the essentially Greek philosophy of the 4th century B.C. and a system of thought which has exercised a profound and far-reaching influence on medieval and modern ethics.

It was left to the Stoics to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to assign to the words "knowledge" and "nature" a saner and more comprehensive meaning.

His manner of life was ascetic; the sayings of the Sermon on the Mount and the practical maxims of the Stoics were his guiding stars.

Though this narrative is a mixture of truth and fiction, it may be said with certainty that a thorough study of the philosophy of Peripatetics and Pythagoreans, Stoics and Platonists, brought home to Justin the conviction that true knowledge was not to be found in them.

It is explained by Cicero as being due to his theory that the scepticism of Carneades was merely a means of attacking the Stoics on their own ground.

Whilst the fathers agree with the Stoics of the 2nd century in representing slavery as an indifferent circumstance in the eye of religion and morality, the contempt for the class which the Stoics too often exhibited is in them replaced by a genuine sympathy.

Nothing else is known of his life, but it is clear that he was eminent amongst the Stoics of the period.

Like the earlier Stoics, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, he held that virtue may be taught.

Thus caught between two fires the casuists developed a highly ingenious method, not unlike that of the Roman Stoics, for eviscerating the substance of a rule while leaving its shadow carefully intact.

The Epicureans regarded fate as blind chance, while to the Stoics everything is subject to an absolute rational law.

He recognized also Ideas and Matter, and borrowed largely from Aristotle and the Stoics.

The Stoics, for example, were more successful in criticizing the current creed than in explaining the underlying truth which they recognized in polytheism.

Among his friends were Tacitus and Suetonius, as well as Frontinus, Martial and Silius Italicus; and the Stoics, Musonius and Helvidius Priscus.

The Sophists and the Sceptics, Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans took up the question, and from the time of Locke and Kant it has been prominent in modern philosophy.

The Stoics divided XoytK17 (logic) into rhetoric and dialectic, and from their time till the end of the middle ages dialectic was either synonymous with, or a part of, logic.

The term "school," however, has not the same meaning as when applied to the Academics or Peripatetics, the Stoics or Epicureans.

But their most immediate influence was upon the Stoics, whose founder, Zeno, studied under Stilpo.

The " Word," or " Logos," is a term derived from Heracleitus of Ephesus and the Stoics, through the Alexandrian Jew Philo, but conceived here throughout as definitely personal.

But the attitude maintained by the Academics was chiefly that of a negative criticism of the views of others, in particular of the somewhat crude and imperious dogmatism of the Stoics.

It must, however, be admitted that much of his knowledge was ill digested; it even appears that he regarded Plato and Speusippus as Stoics.

From about 168 B.C. the head of the Pergamene school was Crates of Mallus, who (like the Stoics) was an adherent of the principle of " anomaly " in grammar, and was thus opposed to Aristarchus of Alexandria, the champion of " analogy."

He also opposed Aristarchus, and supported the Stoics, by insisting on an allegorical interpretation of Homer.

His relations with Cleanthes, contemporaneously criticized by Antipater, are considered under Stoics.

The Stoics had taught them to overstep the political boundaries of states and nationalities, and rise from the Hellenic to a universal human consciousness.

As forerunners of Neoplatonism we may regard, on the one hand, those Stoics who accepted the Platonic distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible, and, on the other hand, the so-called Neopythagoreans and religious philosophers like Plutarch of Chaeronea and especially Numenius of Apamea.

He studied with earnest zeal the Greek philosophers; Plato in particular, and the writings of the Stoics, he had fully at command, and his treatise De Anima shows that he himself was able to investigate and discuss philosophical problems. From the philosophers he had been led to the medical writers, whose treatises plainly had a place in his working library.

As for his theology, its leading factors were - (i.) the teachings of the apologists; (ii.) the philosophy of the Stoics; (iii.) the rule of faith, interpreted in an anti-Gnostic sense, as he had received it from the Church of Rome; (iv.) the Soteriological theology of Melito and Irenaeus; (v.) the substance of the utterances of the Montanist prophets (in the closing decades of his life).

He really left the Peripatetics to combine his scattered discourses and treatises into a system, to call it logic, and logic Organon, and to put it first as the instrument of sciences; and it was the Stoics who first called logic a science, and assigned it the first place in their triple classification of science into logic, physics, ethics.

Further, he defended against the Stoics the Peripatetic doctrine of the eternity of the world and the indestructibility of the human race.

For his importance in the Stoic succession and his philosophy generally, see Stoics.

Seneca (Epistle 9) shows how closely allied Stilpo was to the Stoics.

The Stoics, with the supreme object of giving to human life a definite unity and purpose, made the individual a part of the universe and sought to obliterate all differences.

Like many of the finest spirits under the early empire, Pliny was an adherent to the Stoics.

The stories of the Stoics, who sought to refute the views of Epicurus by an appeal to his alleged antecedents and habits, were no doubt in the main, as Diogenes Laertius says, the stories of maniacs.

To the Epicureans the elaborate logic of the Stoics was a superfluity.

The Stoics discovered that their "perfect man" was not to be found in the luxurious, often morbid society of the Graeco-Roman world; that something more than dialectic ethics was needed to reawaken a sense of responsibility.

Some of the ancients connected her with the earth; Plato, followed by the Stoics, derived her name from tip, the air.

See also STOICS and works quoted.

A fine specimen of sustained humour is to be found in his speech pro Murena, where he rallies the jurisconsults and the Stoics.

Porcius Cato sets forth the doctrine of the Stoics which is shown by Cicero to agree with that of Antiochus of Ascalon; in v.

The history of logic shows that the linguistic distinction between terms and propositions was the sole analysis of reasoning in the logical treatises of Aristotle; that the mental distinction between conceptions (g vvocac) and judgments (a uiwara in a wide sense) was imported into logic by the Stoics; and that this mental distinction became the logical analysis of reasoning under the authority of St Thomas Aquinas.

The Stoics are of more importance.

Despite the fact that their philosophic interests lay rather in ethics and physics, their activity The in what they classified as the third department of specula Stoics.

In the second place, it is in the form in which it was raised in connexion with the individualistic theory of perception with which the Stoics started, that one question of fundamental importance, viz.

Perception, in the view of the Stoics, at its highest both revealed and guaranteed the being of its object.