From about 300 BC to about AD 200 the Stoic philosophers of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds greatly advanced the causes of reason, civil life, law, and morality; but, apart from students of the subject, few persons today are aware of their contributions.1 While some of their teachings have been superseded, many others are still quite tenable. For example, they were the first to teach that there is a basic human kinship inconsistent with the practice of slavery. The school was founded in Athens around 300 BC by one Zeno (there were other famous Zenos). It was an institution of learning in that there were instructors and students, but it owned no real property; instead, the school was conducted in the portico (stoa) of a public building on the Athenian marketplace (agora). Rather quickly, however, branches were set up in other parts of the Mediterranean area, and there were Stoic institutions of research, instruction, and learning all over the region by the beginning of the Roman Empire. These institutions served as centers of Stoic life for many who were not (or were no longer) either students or teachers. There were no “degrees” (that was a mediaeval invention), and there were probably not any “courses” in the modern sense, but there was a structured curriculum.
Unlike the Epicurean school, which kept Epicurean philosophy in a rigid orthodoxy, frozen as it had come from the founder, and unlike the Academy, which veered wildly from dogmatism, through skepticism, to mysticism, the teachings of the Stoic school evolved over the decades and the centuries. Individual teachers innovated; some of them were in touch with scientific and technical developments; refinements and modifications were made in the teachings of earlier Stoics by elaboration and in response to criticism, internal and external. Nonetheless, it is possible to formulate some worthwhile generalizations about Stoic philosophy in the abstract, ignoring the variations on the basic themes.
At least from the time of Chrysippus2 the Stoics divided all “philosophy” (by which the ancients, including the Stoics, meant roughly the system of all genuine human theoretical knowledge) into three subjects: logic, physics, and ethics. While these are the terms they used (or rather, their Greek originals), they included under these headings many topics that we would not. “Logic” included not only formal logic (to which they made substantial and permanent contributions), but epistemology and some aspects of psychology as well. One important topic under logic was “perception” (aisthesis [sensing] and katalepsis [grasping]), which involved some theories of anatomy and physiology. “Physics” included not only all that we would include under natural science, but also metaphysics and theology. Their physical theories were responsive to developments in research, and many turned out to be astonishingly “modern.” Their “ethics” presents no surprises, in that the subjects treated under the heading are, very largely, those that we with our modern understanding of the word would expect. On the other hand, the ethical teachings of the Stoics are, again apart from students of the subject, poorly understood today. The remainder of this outline will supply more substantial information concerning Stoic philosophy by discussing the doctrines, and the reasoning for them, under each of these three headings.
1
The Stoic school persisted long after AD 200, but the spread of Christianity within the Roman Empire caused a gradual decline in all the philosophical schools, culminating with the closing of the schools in Athens by the Emperor Justinian in AD 529. Though many of the early Church Fathers had studied in them, the schools came to be viewed as pagan influences.
2
Chrysippus was the third leader of school; his written works became the basis of the curriculum taught in the school.
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