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Stoicism is a 2, year-old Greek and Roman philosophy that addressed human happiness. This book is a compendium of principal Stoic philosophers Cicero.
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Their response to the second line of attack was two-fold. The first is a metaphysically motivated answer: if any two objects really were indistinguishable, they would be identical. This doctrine has come to be known as the identity of indiscernibles. In some ways, the Stoics have an easier time with skepticism abut knowledge than contemporary non-skeptics do. At bottom what the Stoics are committed to is the two-fold view that it is within our power to avoid falling into error and that there is a kind of impression which reveals to us the world as it really is and which is different from those impressions which might not so reveal the world.

They are manifestly not committed to defending our ordinary intuitions about the range of knowledge: that most people in fact know most of the things that they and everyone else thinks that they know. Recall our observations about the difference between knowledge considered as a system of assents to cognitive impressions that is secure and unshakeable by reason and mere opinion — which may get matters right and may even involve assent to a cognitive impression, but still falls short of knowledge. In short, the Stoics set the bar for knowledge very high and were perfectly willing to accept that knowing was the exception, not the rule, in human affairs.

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The only person we can be sure has any knowledge is the Stoic sage and sages are as rare as the phoenix Alex. Everyone else is equally ignorant. By making opinion a kind of ignorance contrast Plato, Rep V. In the latter example it is stipulated that electrical stimulation of your brain by incredibly clever but unscrupulous scientists produces sense impressions that are indistinguishable from the ones that you are presently having. Surely here we have a demonstration that there could not be a true impression which is such that it could not arise from what is not. No sane person thinks that these skeptical hypotheses are actually true.

The point is rather that if one of them were true, our sense experience would be indistinguishable from what we take to be our true and accurate sense impressions of real tables, chairs and fireplaces. One thing to note in passing is that skeptical scenarios like the evil demon or the brain in the vat did not seem to figure in the debate between the Stoics and Skeptics. The Skeptics press the point that at the time the dream may be completely convincing to the dreamer, even if she does not believe that the events actually transpired when she awakes Cicero, Lucullus or Academica II, They do not consider thought experiments in which all our sense experience is systematically misleading.

But if we set this aside, there will still be one important difference between a clear and distinct impression that arises from a real fireplace and one that arises from the manipulation of my neurons by unscrupulous brain scientists. The first is caused by a fireplace, while the second is caused by some other means. Nothing said thus far by the skeptics rules out the possibility that we have a mechanism that has potential to become sensitive to these differences. We do not have a firmer means of knowing by virtue of which we check candidate impressions to see if they are really cognitive or not.

Rather, we have the potential to increase our sensitivity to cognitive impressions when they are present. Externalists insist that an agent might know a proposition or be justified in believing a proposition even when, nonetheless, the evidence for that belief is not subjectively available to the person.

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So, on one early externalist theory of knowledge, it was suggested that an agent might know a certain sort of proposition e. Annas explores the possibilities for reading the Stoic view as a proto-externalist one. Perin considers the limitations of this reading. So where does this leave the matter? If this is the right way to understand the definition of the Stoic cognitive impression, then it would seem that they win their argument with the Skeptics.

Examples of false impressions that are subjectively indiscernible from clear and distinct, true, ones do not show that there are no cognitive impressions. However, the admission that a cognitive impression might be subjectively indistinguishable from a false impression does alter the sense in which the cognitive impression can serve as a criterion of truth. Assent to a cognitive impression will guarantee that what you assent to is true.

Sextus Empiricus, 69E. But the Stoic sage never errs. For these reasons, the Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus argues that the Stoic sage will never assent to any impression.

An Intro To Stoicism [BEST BOOKS TO START WITH]

In practice, he will suspend judgement, just like the Skeptic does 41C. Another suggestion is that the Stoic sage hedges his bets by assenting only to the impression that it is reasonable that there is fireplace here as Sphaerus did about the pomegranates, 40F. One must first provide a specification of the goal or end telos of living. This may have been thought to provide something like the dust jacket blurb or course description for the competing philosophical systems — which differed radically over how to give the required specification.

A bit of reflection tells us that the goal that we all have is happiness or flourishing eudaimonia. But what is happiness? But their account of what the highest pleasure consists in was not at all straightforward. The Stoics claim that whatever is good must benefit its possessor under all circumstances. But there are situations in which it is not to my benefit to be healthy or wealthy. We may imagine that if I had money I would spend it on heroin which would not benefit me. The only things that are good are the characteristic excellences or virtues of human beings or of human minds : prudence or wisdom, justice, courage and moderation, and other related qualities.

Book review: Lessons in Stoicism, by John Sellars - The Scotsman

But the Stoics are not such lovers of paradox that they are willing to say that my preference for wealth over poverty in most circumstances is utterly groundless. They draw a distinction between what is good and things which have value axia. Some indifferent things, like health or wealth, have value and therefore are to be preferred, even if they are not good, because they are typically appropriate, fitting or suitable oikeion for us.

Impulse, as noted above, is a movement of the soul toward an object. Though these movements are subject to the capacity for assent in fully rational creatures, impulse is present in all animate self-moving things from the moment of birth. The Stoics argue that the original impulse of ensouled creatures is toward what is appropriate for them, or aids in their self-preservation, and not toward what is pleasurable, as the Epicureans contend.

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Because the whole of the world is identical with the fully rational creature which is God, each part of it is naturally constituted so that it seeks what is appropriate or suitable to it, just as our own body parts are so constituted as to preserve both themselves and the whole of which they are parts. Other things being equal, it is objectively preferable to have health rather than sickness. As infants perhaps we only recognised that food and warmth are appropriate to us, but since humans are rational, more than these basic necessities are appropriate to us.

Thus, my blood relatives are — or least ought to be — oikeioi.

It is partly in this sense that we eventually come to the recognition — or at least ought to — that other people, insofar as they are rational, are appropriate to us. It is not only other rational creatures that are appropriate to us, but also the perfection of our own rational natures. Because the Stoics identify the moral virtues with knowledge, and thus the perfection of our rational natures, that which is genuinely good is also most appropriate to us. So, if our moral and intellectual development goes as it should, we will progress from valuing food and warmth, to valuing social relations, to valuing moral virtue.

We then come to see that virtue is the only good. Is that all there is to Stoic ethics? Some writers, such as Annas , suppose that Stoic moral philosophy largely floats free of Stoic metaphysics, and especially from Stoic theology.

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Other writers, such as Cooper , and , suppose that Stoic moral philosophy is intimately intertwined with Stoic metaphysics. When we take the rationality of the world order into consideration, we can begin to understand the Stoic formulations of the goal or end. Since my nature is such that health and wealth are appropriate to me according to my nature , other things being equal, I ought to choose them. Hence the formulations of the end by later Stoics stress the idea that happiness consists in the rational selection of the things according to nature.

But, we must bear in mind an important caveat here. Health and wealth are not the only things which are appropriate to me. So are other rational beings and it would be irrational to choose one thing which is appropriate to me without due consideration of the effect of that choice on other things which are also appropriate to me.

This is why the later formulations stress that happiness consists in the rational selection of the things according to nature. Living in agreement with nature in this sense can even demand that I select things which are not typically appropriate to my nature at all — when that nature is considered in isolation from these particular circumstances.

In extreme circumstances, however, a choice, for example, to end our lives by suicide can be in agreement with nature. Even though the things according to nature have a kind of value axia which grounds the rationality of preferring them other things being equal , this kind of value is still not goodness. From the point of view of happiness, the things according to nature are still indifferent.