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Encyclopedia of Philosophy: STOICISM

Publié le 09/01/2010

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Epicureanism survived for six hundred years after Epicurus’ death; but despite finding incomparable expression in Lucretius’ great poem, it was never as popular as the Stoicism founded by his contemporary Zeno of Citium. Zeno came from Cyprus, where, having read a book about Socrates, he acquired a passion for philosophy which led him to emigrate to Athens, at about the same time as Epicurus. There he was to study under a number of teachers, but on his first arrival he became a pupil of the Cynic Crates, who, he was told, was the nearest contemporary equivalent of Socrates. Cynicism was not a school of philosophy, but a bohemian way of life, based on contempt for material wealth and con¬ventional propriety. Its founder had been Diogenes of Sinope, who lived like a dog (‘cynic’ means ‘dog-like’) in a tub for a kennel. When visited by the great Alexander, who asked what favour he could do him, Diogenes replied ‘you could move out of my light’. Zeno’s encounter with Cynicism taught him to give a prominent place in his philosophy to the ideal of self-sufficiency.  Unlike Diogenes, who loved teasing Plato, and Crates, who liked writing poetic satire, Zeno took systematic philosophy seriously. His writings have not survived, and for our knowledge of his teaching we rely on writers from the Roman period, such as Nero’s court philosopher Seneca and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. We do know that he founded the Stoic tradition of dividing philosophy into three main disciplines, logic, ethics and physics. His followers said that logic was the bones, ethics the flesh, and physics the soul of philosophy. Zeno himself was concerned principally with ethics, but he was a close associate of two dia¬lecticians from Megara, Diodorus Cronus and Philo, who had taken over from the Lyceum the task of filling the gaps which Aristotle had left in logic.

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