From ancient to new Stoicism: I—Stoic physics
A conceptual map of where Stoicism came from and where it may be going
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Time to update Stoicism for the 21st century and beyond, don’t you think? I mean, the philosophy has been around since the 4th century BCE, but a few things have changed since then. Indeed, the initiative I recently announced, the School for a New Stoicism, has as its main objective to help bring this venerable and eminently practical philosophy squarely into modern times.
Naturally, I’m not the first one to try to update Stoicism, or to feel the need for it. In my mind the most serious attempt in that direction was made by Larry Becker, author of the aptly titled A New Stoicism. I made my own little contribution to the project by publishing an updated version of Epictetus’s Enchiridion entitled A Field Guide to a Happy Life.
This sort of efforts are different from those aimed at popularizing Stoicism, such as books by Don Robertson, John Sellars, and others. Though sometimes we see a combination of the two aims, as in Robertson’s Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, or Bill Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life.
In this series of essays I want to do three things: first, to provide an accessible summary of the basic ideas that define Stoicism, because if we don’t have clarity about the starting point then we don’t know where we are going. Second, to discuss three major attempts made so far to update Stoicism to modern times. Lastly, to articulate at least a draft of my own thinking about what a 21st century version of Stoicism may look like.
Specifically, the plan is for the current essay to cover ancient Stoic physics; for the next two to complete the trio of Stoic fields of inquiry by discussing ancient Stoic logic and ethics respectively. We will then move on to consider Becker’s new Stoicism (essay four in the series), Piotr Stankiewicz’s “reformed” Stoicism (essay five), and Steven Gambardella’s new Stoicism (essay six). The final essay in the series will then get to my own proposal. How does that sound?
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My discussion of ancient Stoic physics, logic, and ethics is going to be based on my own understanding of the subject matter, developed over the past decade or so. However, an excellent scholarly source in order to dig deeper is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article authored by Marion Durand and Simon Shogry. The bibliography section by itself is worth the effort.
Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BCE, is a philosophical system comprising three pillars: physics, logic, and ethics. “Physics” comes from the Greek phusis, meaning nature. Physics, therefore, here stands for the study of nature, which includes what we would today call science and metaphysics. “Logic” included not just formal logic, but also epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. And “ethics” was far more encompassing than discussions about right and wrong action, including everything to do with human character and social-political behavior.
The basic idea put forth by the Stoics is that to live well (ethics) is possible only if one understands the world one lives in (physics) and reasons correctly about it (logic). Which strikes me as eminently, well, logical!
I’m starting this series with physics because that’s the way Durand and Shogry do it, but we could have just as well started with logic. Ethics, by contrast, has to go last, because it depends on the first two.
Please keep in mind that the objective of the first three essays in this series is to present a complete picture of ancient Stoicism, not (yet) to update it. So while I will be occasionally making comparisons with modern science, logic, and ethics, such comparisons are only meant to clarify what the ancients were thinking, not (yet) to suggest ways in which their notions might be updated and reinterpreted.
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