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Stoicism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Stoicism is a school of philosophy commonly associated with such
philosophers as Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus.
Organized at Athens in the third century B.C.E. (310 BC) by Zeno of Citium
and Chrysippus. The Stoics provided a unified account of the world that
comprised formal logic, materialistic physics, and naturalistic ethics.
Later Roman Stoics emphasized more exclusively the development of
recommendations for living in harmony with a natural world over which one
has no direct control.
The Stoic philosophy developed from that of the Cynics whose founder,
Antisthenes, had been a disciple of Socrates. The Stoics emphasized ethics
as the main field of knowledge, but they also developed theories of logic
and natural science to support their ethical doctrines.
Holding a somewhat materialistic conception of nature they followed
Heraclitus in believing the primary substance to be fire. They also
embraced his concept of Logos which they identified with the energy, law,
reason, and providence found throughout nature.
They held Logos to be the animating or 'active principle' of all reality.
The Logos was conceived as a rational divine power that orders and directs
the universe; it was identified with God, nature, and fate. Human reason
and the human soul were both considered part of the divine Logos, and
therefore immortal.
The foundation of Stoic ethics is the principle, proclaimed earlier by the
Cynics, that good lies in the state of the soul itself, in wisdom and
restraint. Stoic ethics stressed the rule "Follow where Reason leads"; one
must therefore resist the influence of the passions-love, hate, fear, pain,
and pleasure.
Living according to nature or reason, they held, is living in conformity
with the divine order of the universe. The four cardinal virtues of the
Stoic philosophy are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, a
classification derived from the teachings of Plato.
A distinctive feature of Stoicism is its cosmopolitanism. All people are
manifestations of the one universal spirit and should, according to the
Stoics, live in brotherly love and readily help one another. They held that
external differences such as rank and wealth are of no importance in social
relationships. Thus, before the rise of Christianity, Stoics recognized and
advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human
beings. Stoicism became the most influential school of the Greco-Roman
world and produced a number of remarkable writers and personalities.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism