Stoic Tradition

The ancient philosophy of Stoicism found both admirers and critics during the Renaissance. Early humanists such as Petrarca and Salutati admired many aspects of Stoic philosophy, based on their reading of Cicero and Seneca. Seneca attracted much humanist attention and was the subject of biographies and commentaries. However Stoicism also had its critics, from an Epicurean Valla to the Platonic Ficino. The recovery and translation of Greek authors such as Diogenes Laertius and Epictetus expanded knowledge of the Stoa. Whereas early Humanists associated Stoicism with Cicero and Seneca, later generations returned Zeno and Chrysippus to centre stage. Seneca remained important, even after the correspondence with St Paul was dismissed as spurious, and attracted the attention of Erasmus, Calvin, and Lipsius. It was with Lipsius that the fortunes of Stoicism changed dramatically. His De constantia founded what has come to be called Neostoicism, while his two Stoic handbooks published in 1604 brought together for the first time more or less all the surviving evidence for Stoic philosophy. His contemporaries Montaigne and Du Vair presented Stoic ideas in the vernacular and re-emphasized the practical orientation of Stoicism. The early seventeenth century saw a flurry of scholarly studies by Bursius, Scioppius, and Casaubon alongside those of Lipsius. Throughout the period a continual theme was the compatibility of Stoicism with Christianity; by the end of the period they were firmly disconnected, paving the way for eighteenth century presentations of Stoicism as a form of materialism and atheism.

This essay offers an introduction to Justus Lipsius's dialogue De Constantia, first published in 1584. Although the dialogue bears a superficial similarity to philosophical works of consolation, I suggest that it should be approached as a spiritual exercise written by Lipsius primarily for his own benefit.

This article examines the reception of Stoicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Justus Lipsius to Immanuel Kant. It considers topics often associated with Stoicism during the period, notably the interconnected concepts of fate, necessity, and providence, as well as the rise and development of scholarship on Stoicism during the period. While this was an especially rich period for the reception of Stoicism, more often than not the Stoics found themselves drawn into contemporary disputes, such as the potentially atheistic conclusions of Spinoza's philosophy. At the same time, it saw a shift away from seeing Seneca as the pre-eminent Stoic and towards the systematic philosophy of Zeno and Chrysippus.

Introduction | Stoicism in Rome | Stoicism in Early Christianity | Plotinus and the Platonic Response to Stoicism | Augustine’s Debt to Stoicism in the Confessions | Boethius and Stoicism | Stoic Themes in Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury | Stoic Influences in the Later Middle Ages | The Recovery of Stoicism in the Renaissance | Stoicism in the Philosophy of the Italian Renaissance | Erasmus, Calvin, and the Faces of Stoicism in Renaissance and Reformation Thought | Justus Lipsius and Neostoicism | Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature | Medicine of the Mind in Early Modern Philosophy | Stoic Themes in Early Modern French Thought | Spinoza and Stoicism | Leibniz and the Stoics: Fate, Freedom, and Providence | The Epicurean Stoicism of the French Enlightenment | Stoicism and the Scottish Enlightenment | Kant and Stoic Ethics | Stoicism in Nineteenth Century German Philosophy | Stoicism and Romantic Literature | Stoicism in Victorian Culture | Stoicism in America | Stoic Themes in Contemporary Anglo-American Ethics | Stoicism and Twentieth Century French Philosophy | The Stoic Influence on Modern Psychotherapy

In his De Constantia of 1584, Justus Lipsius examines the Stoic theory of fate, distancing himself from it by outlining four key points at which it should be modified. The modified theory is often presented as a distinctly Christianized form of Stoicism. Later, in his Physiologia Stoicorum of 1604, Lipsius revisits the Stoic theory, this time offering a more sympathetic reading, with the four modifications forgotten. It is widely assumed that Lipsius’s position shifted between these two works, perhaps due to a better grasp of the Stoic position by the time of the later work. I argue that in fact there is no great distance between the two accounts and that both find only one point of difficulty with the Stoic theory, a point that Lipsius himself presents in both works as merely a matter of expression.

Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is a remarkably creative piece of writing that came down to us from the middle ages. It has been considered a classic of medieval Islamic philosophy, and a classic of Arabic novels that had a great influence on the medieval and renaissance west.
The theme of East and West is given prominence in this paper. The first part of my argument concerns the ideological and cultural coloring of the context in which this novel was written. The second part deals with the point of intersection of contesting ideologies in the novel. It also deals with the astonishing variety of conclusions the novel has yielded.
In estimating the novel as both philosophical literature and literary philosophy, which as I argue, cannot be studied in isolation from the famous translation movement (from Greek into Arabic in the middle ages), I would not exclude another possibility that Ibn Tufayl benefited from stoicism. This presupposes Ibn Tufayl's acquaintance with the stoics.
There are also similarities between Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and the cosmogony of the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in relation to his account of the creation and early history of man, which was influenced by the Epicurean Roman poet Lucretius.
I would suggest that there might have been a common Greek source, read by Lucretius, Ovid and Ibn Tufayl (in translation in the last case).
Although, in a way, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan was a direct consequence of Greek thought translated into Arabic, Ibn Tufayl, however, pursued his own Islamic way of reconciling philosophy with religion.

Los intérpretes y las fuentes mismas del estoicismo tienden a equiparar las nociones de providencia, racionalidad y ley natural. En contraste con esta tendencia, el objetivo de este artículo es hacer un análisis de dichas nociones con miras a delimitar cuál es el papel explicativo que los estoicos atribuían a cada una de ellas. Esto permitirá tener una mejor comprensión de la teoría estoica de la constitución del mundo y de las diferentes funciones que la mente divina desempeña en ella. Se argumentará que la providencia es una función vinculada a la voluntad divina y referente al objetivo buscado en la constitución del mundo. La racionalidad divina remite a las exigencias lógicas y causales que han de ser respetadas en dicha constitución. Y la noción de ley natural remite a un aspecto normativo de la naturaleza establecido por la recta razón divina.

The article investigates a contribution of the Stoic ideas to Leo Tolstoy's religious philosophy. The problem is considered in the context of the alleged “break” in the creative development of Leo Tolstoy in the late 1870s. Although Tolstoy had been familiar with the texts and ideas of the Stoics before this time and, probably, made some allusions to the Stoics in “War and Peace”, it is possible to say that in that time the Stoic ideas as such were not of significance for him. The thinker might have realized the deeper meaning of the Stoic tradition against the background of the teachings of Christ. Applying the methods of textual analysis, the author shows that after the conversion Tolstoy sought to use some aspects of the Stoic religious narrative (men's mind as a part of the divine one, the unity of the universe) as a support for his own pantheistic
(panentheistic) views, in which both his ethical and social values were rooted.

The paper aims to analyse the phenomenon of Stoic narrative in the western philosophical thought. Considering narrative as a subtype of discourse, the author reveals correlation of the notions “Stoic narrative” and “Stoic wisdom” in the western philosophy. Relying on works of domestic and foreign specialists in Stoic philosophy, the researcher for the first time applies narrative methodology to identify the role of “Stoic wisdom” in culture, which constitutes scientific originality of the study. The findings indicate that Stoic narrative, being an integral component of the western philosophical thought, is an autonomous form of the Stoic doctrine cultural representation, along with Stoa and Stoicism. Interpreting Stoa Poikile (Painted Porch) heritage as narrative allows developing new methodology to study the place and role of Stoic conceptions in philosophy