Stoics Sentence Examples

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.

The controversy as to the selfevidence of perception in which the New Academy effected some sort of conversion of the younger Stoics, and in which the Sceptics opposed both, is one of the really vital issues of the decadence.

Another doctrine of the Stoics which has interest in the light of certain modern developments is their insistence on the place of the in knowledge.

Recognizing a linguistic side to " logical " theory with a natural development in rhetoric, the Stoics endeavour to exorcise considerations of language from the contrasted side.

The Stoics were too " scholastic " in their speculations.

The logic of the Stoics had been discredited by the sceptical onset, but in any case there was no organon of a fitness even comparable to Aristotle's for the task of drawing out the implications of dogmatic premises.

The stoics, on the other hand, taught his immanence, while the eclectics sought truth by the mingling of the two ideas.

As Poggio Bracciolini writes, "none of the Stoics with so constant and brave a soul endured death, which he (Jerome) seemed rather to long for."

Both groups had their scientific theologians who sought to vindicate their characteristic doctrines, the Adoptianist divines holding by the Aristotelian philosophy, and the Modalists by that of the Stoics; while the Trinitarians (Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Novatian), on the other hand, appealed to Plato.

These three together make up the intellectual (as opposed to the physical) system of the universe; and they are opposed respectively by three false principles, atheism, religious fatalism which refers all moral distinctions to the will of God, and thirdly the fatalism of the ancient Stoics, who recognized God and yet identified Him with nature.

The belief that the Powers controlling man's life are willing upon occasion to disclose something of their purpose, has led to widespread rites of divination, which Plato described as the " art of fellowship between gods and men," and the Stoics defended on grounds of a priori religious expectation as well as of universal experience.

The Stoics always counted themselves.

Herein lies the key to the entire system of the Stoics, as Cleanthes's epoch-making discovery continually received fresh applications to physics, ethics and epistemology.

Now, however effective against Plato's contemporary Cynics or Atomists, the reasoning is thrown away upon the Stoics, who take boldly the one horn of this dilemma.

Now, to the Stoics nothing passes unexplained; there is a reason (Xbyos) for everything in nature.

Its history will serve as a sketch of the cosmogony of the Stoics, for they too, like earlier philosophers,, g y have their fairy tales of science."

From the astronomers the Stoics borrowed their picture of the universe - a plenum in the form of a series of layers or concentric rings, first the elements, then the planetary and stellar spheres, massed round the earth as centre - a picture which dominated the imagination of men from the days of Eudoxus down to those of Dante or even Copernicus.

If, however, in the science of nature the Stoics can lay claim to no striking originality, the case is different when we come to the science of man.

On the one hand, soul is corporeal, else it would have no real existence, would be incapable of extension in three dimensions (and therefore of equable diffusion all over the body), incapable of holding the body together, as the Stoics contended that it does, herein presenting a sharp contrast to the Epicurean tenet that it is the body which confines and shelters the light vagrant atoms of soul.

The Stoics explained it as a transmission of the perceived quality of the object, by means of the sense organ, into the percipient's mind, the quality transmitted appearing as a disturbance_or impression upon the corporeal surface of that " thinking thing," the soul.

That Zeno and Cleanthes crudely compared this presentation to the impression which a seal bears upon wax, with protuberances and indentations, while Chrysippus more prudently determined it vaguely as an occult modification or " mode " of mind, is an interesting but not intrinsically important detail But the mind is no mere passive recipient of impressions from without, in the view of the Stoics.

However, the younger Stoics endeavoured to meet the assaults of their persistent critic Carneades by suggesting various modes of testing a single presentation, to see whether it were consistent with others, especially such as occurred in groups, &c.; indeed, some went so far as to add to the definition " coming from a real object and exactly corresponding with it " the clause " provided it encounter no obstacle."

Like all materialists, the Stoics can only distinguish the sensible from the intelligible as Degrees of thinking when the external object is present (alrOfivEr6at) and thinking when it is absent The product of the latter kind includes memory (though this is, upon a strict analysis, something intermediate), and conceptions or general notions, under which were confusedly classed the products of the imaginative faculty.

But the Stoics were not slow to exalt the part of reason, which seizes upon the generic qualities, the essential nature of things.

With this exposition we have already invaded the province of logic. To this the Stoics assigned a miscellany of studies - rhetoric, dialectic, including grammar, in addition to formal Logic. logic - to all of which their industry made contributions.

For this the Stoics substituted four summa genera, all subordinate, so that each in turn is more precisely determined by the next.

The very perfection and precision of this method constantly tempted the later Stoics to abuse it for the systematic depreciation of the objects analysed.

The ethical theory of the Stoics stands in the closest connexion with their physics, psychology and cosmology.

The Stoics not only drew up an elaborate scheme of duties, but also crystallized their theory in a general law, namely that true goodness lies in the knowledge of nature and is obtained by the exercise of Reason.

In contrast to the Cyrenaics and the Epicureans, the Stoics denied that pleasure is actually or ought to be the object of human activity.

In their view of man's social relations the Stoics are greatly in advance of preceding schools.

For the Stoics attached but slight importance to external circumstances, since only the wise man is really free, and all the unwise are slaves.

At the same time the Stoics felt at liberty to defend and uphold the truth in polytheism.

Now it is highly improbable that the earlier Stoics would have sanctioned such interpretations of their dogmas.

In all that the older Stoics taught there breathes that enthusiasm for righteousness in which has been traced the earnestness of the Semitic spirit; but nothing presents more forcibly the pitch of their moral idealism than the doctrine of the Wise Man.

It has been well said that the old heroes of the republic were unconscious Stoics, fitted by their narrowness, their stern simplicity and devotion to duty for the almost Semitic earnestness of the new doctrine.

He marks a reaction of the genuine Hellenic spirit against the narrow austerity of the first Stoics.

The gloss he put upon the definition of the end was " a life in accordance with the promptings given us by nature "; the terms are all used by older Stoics, but the individual nature (*ay) seems to be emphasized.

Yet the older Stoics held that this 00-Ls was changed to a true soul (kxi) at birth.

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.

The writings of the later Stoics have come down to us, if not entire, in great part, so that Seneca, Cornutus, Persius, Lucan, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius are known at first hand.

Towards this goal of approximation to Cynicism the later Stoics had all along been tending.

Epictetus is marked out amongst Stoics by his renunciation of the world.

The word " palingenesis " or rather " palingenesia " may be traced back to the Stoics, who used the term for the continual re-creation of the universe by the Demiurgus (Creator) after its absorption into himself.

On the side of the Stoics it was argued that if divination was a real art, there must be gods who gave it to mankind; against this it was argued that signs of future events may be given without any god.

In his doctrine of virtue the distinctive Peripatetic position regarding the importance of external goods was defended by him with emphasis against the assaults of the Stoics.

The followers of Simon Magus, of Menander and of Marcion, he says, were all called Christians, but so also Epicureans and Stoics were alike called philosophers.

Like the Stoics he conceived of it as an intelligent being.

These are marked off by the names of Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Stoics and Philo.

It is a capital element in the system of the Stoics.

The Logos of the Stoics (q.v.) is a reason in the world gifted with intelligence, and analogous to the reason in man.

It preserved the monotheistic idea yet afforded a description of the Divine activity in terms of Hellenic thought; the Word of the Old Testament is one with the X6yos of the Stoics.

The Stoics indeed sought, more or less consciously, by their doctrine of the Logos as the Infinite Reason to escape from the belief in a divine Creator, but Philo, Jew to the core, starts from the Jewish belief in a supreme, self-existing God, to whom the reason of the world must be subordinated though related.

The idea was taken up by the Stoics, and in the Roman period generally accepted.

He regards the Stoics as having initiated a philosophical theology, and gives numerous references for the " three theologies " which they distinguished.

For though Aristotle's divergence from Plato is very conspicuous when we consider either his general conception of the subject of ethics, or the details of his system of virtues, still his agreement with his master is almost complete as regards the main outline of his theory of human good; the difference between the two practically vanishes when we view them in relation to the later controversy between Stoics and Epicureans.

But happiness so definitely signifies a state of feeling that it will not admit the interpretation that Aristotle (as well as Plato and the Stoics) expressly gives to eu5acuovia; the confusion is best avoided by rendering the word by the less familiar " well-being."

It is true that the Cynics were more concerned to emphasize the negative side of the sage's well-being, while the Stoics brought into more prominence its positive side.

The Stoics, in fact, seem generally to have regarded the eccentricities of Cynicism as an emphatic manner of expressing the essential antithesis between philosophy and the world; a manner which, though not necessary or even normal, might yet be advantageously adopted by the sage under certain circumstances.2 Wherein, then, consists this knowledge or wisdom that makes free and perfect?

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.

We may observe, too, that the Stoics rejected the divergence which we have seen gradually taking place in Platonic-Aristotelian thought from the position of Socrates, " that no one aims at what he knows to be bad."

That this impassive sage was a being not to be found among living men the later Stoics at least were fully aware.

Similarly, all wisdom was somehow involved in any one of the manifestations of wisdom, commonly distinguished as particular virtues; though whether these virtues were specifically distinct, or only the same knowledge in different relations, was a subtle question on which the Stoics do not seem to have been agreed.

Now, Aristotle's divergence from Socrates had not led him so far as to deny this; while for the Stoics who had receded to the original Socratic position, the difficulty was still more patent.

This alternative is the less dangerous to morality, and as such the Stoics chose it.

The analogy, however, must not be pressed too far, since orthodox Stoics do not ever seem to have regarded Cynicism as the more perfect way.

The Stoics were not quite agreed as to the immutability of virtue, but they were agreed that, when once possessed, it could only be lost through the loss of reason itself.

The Stoics answered that the error which was the essence of vice was so far voluntary that it could be avoided if men chose to exercise their reason.

The Stoics, on the other hand, not only worked out a detailed system of duties - or, as they termed them, " things meet and fit " (Ka6 r i Kovra) for all occasions of life; they were further especially concerned to comprehend them under a general formula.

The peculiarity of the Stoics lay in their refusing to use the terms " good and evil " in connexion with " things indifferent," and in pointing out that philosophers, though independent of these things, must yet deal with them in practical life.

Here, however, we especially notice the double significance of " natural," as applied to (I) what actually exists everywhere or for the most part, and (2) what would exist if the original plan of man's life were fully carried out; and we find that the Stoics have not clearly harmonized the two elements of the notion.

Similarly, in the view taken by the Stoics of the duties of social decorum, and in their attitude to the popular religion, we find a fluctuating compromise between the disposition to repudiate what is conventional, and the disposition to revere what is 1 The Stoics seem to have varied in their view of " good repute," eu50 ia; at first, when the school was more under the influence of Cynicism, they professed an outward as well as an inward indifference to it; ultimately they conceded the point to common sense, and included it among rrponyp. va.

Among the primary ends of nature, in which wisdom recognized a certain preferability, the Stoics included freedom from bodily pain; but they refused, even in this outer Stoics and court of wisdom, to find a place for pleasure.

In this sense it may be fairly said that Stoics and Epicureans made rival offers to mankind of the same kind of happiness; and the philosophical peculiarities of either system may be traced to the desire of being undisturbed by the changes and chances of life.

On the other hand, the changes in Stoicism are very noteworthy; and it is the more easy to trace them, as the only original writings of this school which we possess are those of the later Roman Stoics.

It was natural that the earlier Stoics should be chiefly occupied with delineating the inner and outer characteristics of ideal wisdom and virtue, and that the gap between the ideal sage and the actual philosopher, though never ignored, should yet be somewhat overlooked.

Accordingly the ethics of Plotinus represent, we may say, the moral idealism of the Stoics cut loose from nature.

Rightness of purpose, preference of virtue for its own sake, suppression of vicious desires, were made essential points by the - Aristotelians, who attached the most importance to outward circumstances in their view of virtue, no less than by the Stoics, to whom all outward things were indifferent.

Or even if it were held with some of the Stoics that true wisdom was out of the reach of the best men actually living, it none the less remained the ideal condition of perfect human life.

Cicero, on the other hand, in his paraphrase of a Stoic treatise on external duties (De officiis), ranks the rendering of positive services to other men as a chief department of social duty; and the Stoics generally recognized the universal fellowship and natural mutual claims of human beings as such.

Again, - just as the Stoics held wisdom to be indispensable to real rectitude of conduct, while at the same time they included under the notion of wisdom a grasp of physical as well as ethical truth, so the similar emphasis laid on inwardness in Christian ethics caused orthodoxy or correctness of religious belief to be regarded as essential to goodness, and heresy as the most fatal of vices, corrupting as it did the very springs of Christian life.

In arranging his list, however, he defers to the established doctrine of the four cardinal virtues (derived from Plato and the Stoics through Cicero); accordingly, the Aristotelian ten have to stand under the higher genera of (1) the prudence which gives reasoned rules of conduct, (2) the temperance which restrains misleading desire, and (3) the fortitude that resists misleading fear of dangers or toils.

As regards his conception of the Law of Nature, he takes it in the main immediately from Grotius and Pufendorf, more remotely from the Stoics and the Roman jurists.

These works deal with music, rhetoric, ethics, signs, virtues and vices, and defend the Epicurean standpoint against the Stoics and the Peripatetics.

Posidonius and Strabo, both of them Stoics like Polybius himself, are said to have written continuations of his history (Suidas, s.v.; Strabo p. 515).

Its ethical results may be compared with the ideal tranquillity of the Stoics and the Epicureans.

For, though the quarrel with popular anthropomorphism was patched up, and the gods of the Pantheon were described by Stoics and Epicureans as manlike in form, philosophy nevertheless tended to highly abstract conceptions of supreme, or real, deity.

Earlier on, Tertullian had borrowed from the stoics the doctrine of the soul's corporeality as well as God's own corporeality.

Since a finite number of particles is only susceptible of finite transpositions, it must happen (he says), in an eternal duration that every possible order or position will be tried an infinite number of times, and hence this world is to be regarded (as the Stoics maintained) as an exact reproduction of previous worlds.

Zeno was a pupil of Crates, from whom he learned the moral worth of self-control and indifference to sensual indulgence (see Stoics).

Yet the idealistic postulate of a summum bonum is in result optimistic, and this view predominated among the Stoics and the Neoplatonists.

With indomitable perseverance he applied himself to these subjects; although himself a teacher, he regularly attended the lectures of Ammonius Saccas, and made a thorough study of the books of Plato and Numenius, of the Stoics and the Pythagoreans.

Thinkers chose their doctrines from many sources - from the venerated teaching of Aristotle and Plato, from that of the Pythagoreans and of the Stoics, from the old Greek mythology, and from the Jewish and other Oriental systems. Yet it must be observed that Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and the other systems which are grouped under the name Alexandrian, were not truly eclectic, consisting, as they did, not of a mere syncretism of Greek and Oriental thought, but of a mutual modification of the two.

The combative energy, the sense of superiority, the spirit of satire, characteristic of him as a Roman, unite with his loyalty to Epicurus to render him not only polemical but intolerant and contemptuous in his tone toward the great antagonists of his system, the Stoics, whom, while constantly referring to them, he does not condescend even to name.

In common with other Stoics of the middle period, he displayed eclectic tendencies, following the older Stoics, Panaetius, Plato and Aristotle.

There is no notion that may not deceive us; it is impossible to distinguish between false and true impressions; therefore the Stoic 4avravia KaTaMprrud7 (see Stoics) must be given up. There is no criterion of truth.

The grammar of the Stoics, gradually elaborated by Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, supplied a terminology which, in words such as " genitive," " accusative " and " aorist," has become a permanent part of the grammarian's vocabulary; and the study of this grammar found its earliest home in Pergamum.

Yet even on this point it learned something from the Stoics; the Neoplatonic conception of the action of the Deity on the world and of the essence and origin of matter can only be explained by reference to the dynamic pantheism of the Stoa.

He appears to have accepted all the Stoic doctrines except that he denied the final conflagration of the universe (see Stoics).

Thus the fundamental ideas of a middle state after death and of a purification preparatory to perfect blessedness are met with in Zoroaster, who takes souls through twelve stages before they are sufficiently purified to enter heaven; and the Stoics conceived of a middle place of enlightenment which they called Eµirtpw ns.

But this is altogether wrong, and the proofs offered, when rightly sifted, are often seen to rest upon the distortion of Heraclitean doctrine in the reports of later writers, to assimilate it to the better known but essentially distinct innovations of the Stoics.