Search results for "stoicism"
showing 10 items of 27 documents
The Individual and the Community in Stoic Pragmatism
2023
The present paper outlines John Lachs’s idea of stoic pragmatism and develops its important part that is the relation between the individual and the community. In his project, Lachs reduces the whole tradition of Stoic philosophy to its later, Roman version and tries to link it with the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism (especially William James, John Dewey, and George Santayana, who is close to pragmatism at some points) hoping that it is possible for these two to "enrich and complete each other" so that to provide "a better attitude to life than either of the two views alone." Stoic pragmatism pursues factual improvement in the quality of life for individuals living in given …
Dumb Animals: A Short History of Classical Logocentrism
2021
Among the most common and influential stereotypes of Greco-Roman literature is the idea that animals are ‘dumb’ (ἄλογα/muta), that is, mute and devoid of reason. In recent years, several explorations of what Stephen Newmyer has aptly called the ‘man alone of animals’ topos have pointed out that in asserting the privileged status of humans the ancients attached special importance to articulate language. Yet, most of these explorations have adopted a thematic rather than historical approach in an attempt to provide a comparative assessment of ancient and modern paradigms. In the present paper, I follow a historical line through the literary representations of animals as ‘dumb’, focusing on tw…
Healing Grief: A Commentary on Seneca's Consolatio ad Marciam
2023
Both our view of Seneca’s philosophical thought and our approach to the ancient consolatory genre have radically changed since the latest commentary on the Consolatio ad Marciam was written in 1981. The aim of this work is to offer a new book-length commentary on the earliest of Seneca’s extant writings, along with a revision of the Latin text and a reassessment of Seneca’s intellectual program, strategies, and context. A crucial document to penetrate Seneca’s discourse on the self in its embryonic stages, the Ad Marciam is here taken seriously as an engaging attempt to direct the persuasive power of literary models and rhetorical devices toward the fundamentally moral project of healing Ma…
la filosofia stoico-pragmatica di Lucio Anneo Seneca e il suicidio: contemporaneità dell'antico?
2009
Self-Causation and Unity in Stoicism
2021
Abstract According to the Stoics, ordinary unified bodies—animals, plants, and inanimate natural bodies—each have a single cause of unity and being: pneuma. Pneuma itself has no distinct cause of unity; on the contrary, it acts as a cause of unity and being for itself. In this paper, I show how pneuma is supposed to be able to unify itself and other bodies in virtue of its characteristic tensile motion (τονικὴ κίνησις). Thus, we will see how the Stoics could have hoped to account for corporeal unity by positing another body (pneuma) apparently itself in need of unification.
Veniet Tempus (QNat.7.25): Stoic Philosophy and Roman Genealogy in Seneca's View of Scientific Progress
2014
Seneca's views on the future development of knowledge have often been interpreted as an enlightened anticipation of the modern faith in progress. And Seneca himself has been depicted as a sort of Condorcet avant la lettre. In the present paper, I argue that while it is extremely interesting to investigate the reception of Senecan patterns in modern thought, the writer's idea of scientific and moral enhancement should primarily be understood in the intellectual and socio-anthropological framework of ancient culture. Indeed, a reassessment of the evidence offered by the Natural Questions and the Moral Epistles shows that Seneca devises a broadly conceived spectrum of progress, which reflects …
From Zeno to Chrysippus
2015
This chapter is about the origin and development of early Stoic epistemology. I discuss how Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoa, was influenced by his predecessors and interpreted by his successors. I argue that Stoicism rely on two basic assumptions for which Socrates is the main predecessor, namely that human beings are at home in the world and that it is only by using our rational abilities to detect salient truths and organize them into skills that we can successfully orient ourselves in this world. This Socratic-Stoic position relies on a naturalistic theory of concept acquisition, for which Aristotle is the main predecessor, or so I argue. I then look at how Zeno’s original episte…
Commune Ius Animantium (Clem. 1.18.2): Seneca's Naturalism and the Problem of Animal Rights
2013
The present paper focuses on an intriguing passage of Seneca's treatise 'On Clemency' (De Clementia) dealing with the topic of human and animal rights (1.18.1-2). This is the only passage in which the Latin philosopher employs the juridically and philosophically significant expression 'commune ius animantium', thus referring to a form of nature-based 'animal right'. In Seneca's words, there would be a common right of living beings forbidding to perpetrate certain acts of violence. On the whole, however, the passage seems to aim at maintaining the inviolability of human rights, paying special attention to the pitiful condition of slaves. Given the presence of such a man-centered context, sch…
Vox Naturae: The Myth of Animal Nature in the Latin Roman Republic
2016
The paper examines the representation of animals as embodiment of nature in the culture of the late Roman republic. By discussing a selection of passages from Sallust, Cicero and Lucretius in conjunction with other Greek and Latin sources, the paper shows that the typically Western myth of 'animal nature' - the cultural belief that animal mirror a perennial state of nature, as opposed to human society - played a very important role in the ethical debate of the first century BC and took in this period a form which was bound to influence the centuries to come.
L'Analogie chez Aristote
2021
Revue de philosophie dont l’objet est de montrer, d’interroger ou d’évaluer les comparaisons effectives dans les différents champs disciplinaires, Analogia est une publication scientifique annuelle de l’IPC.Chaque numéro réunit un conseil scientifique nouveau chargé de sélectionner les contributions en double aveugle.L’Analogie chez Aristote.Sous la direction d’Emmanuel Brochier.Conseil scientifique :- Katerina Ierodiakonou (Genève – Athènes)- André Laks (Paris)- Benjamin C. Morison (Princeton)- Jean-Luc Solère (Boston)Sommaire :- Présentation, par Emmanuel Brochier, p. 5 ;- Christof Rapp : "Spotting similarities between disparate items" Observations on the use of analogy in Aristotle’s met…