201 cards
Stoicism arose in Athens around 300 BCE when Zeno of Citium began teaching philosophy in a public colonnade called the Stoa Poikile, or "Painted Porch," from which the school takes its name. Zeno organized his teaching into three interconnected branches: Logic, which governs how we think; Physics, which examines the na...
For the Stoics, virtue is the only true good, while vice is the only true evil. Everything else—health, wealth, reputation, illness, poverty—falls into the category of indifferents, neither good nor bad in themselves, though Stoics distinguish preferred indifferents (such as health) from dispreferred ones (such as sick...
Three Roman thinkers dominate the surviving literature of Stoicism: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Seneca, a wealthy Roman senator and dramatist who lived from 4 BCE to 65 CE, was a prolific writer whose Letters to Lucilius explain Stoic ideas in accessible, practical terms. He also composed essays such as "On...
Stoics approach the inner life with what might be called a cognitive theory of emotion. Emotions, in their view, are not caused by events themselves but by the judgments we form about those events. Epictetus famously summed up the doctrine: "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them." Th...
Stoicism is not primarily a system to be read but a way of life to be practiced. The school emphasized daily exercises—what Pierre Hadot later called "spiritual exercises"—designed to retrain perception, desire, and judgment. Two rituals structure the day: a morning preparation and an evening review. The morning ritual...
Stoics are not hermits. They value the inner citadel of the mind, but they also teach that human beings are fundamentally social creatures whose reason is shared. Cosmopolitanism—the idea that all humans are citizens of one world, bound together by reason—follows directly from this recognition. Justice extends beyond c...
Stoicism was not formed in isolation. Its founder Zeno studied with the Cynic Crates, and Cynicism—exemplified by Diogenes of Sinope and his rejection of social conventions in pursuit of natural living—shaped Zeno's emphasis on virtue and self-sufficiency. Epicureanism, the major philosophical rival of Stoicism in the...