Following nature: A study in Stoic ethics

Abstract

The following rather lengthy piece is a revised version of the Nellie-Wallace lectures I give at Oxford University in the spring of 1984. My aim in this series of six talks was to put together an outline of Stoic ethics that would permit an audience of non-specialists to see some of the connections between the notorious bits of Stoic doctrine with which – or so I assumed – most of us are familiar. For example, most philosophers or classicists will have heard that the Stoics believed the universe was governed by a divine reason, identified with nature; that they defended the view that virtue is the only good, and that the virtuous person would be free from all emotion. But I thought that it was not so clear, given our fragmentary sources, how these doctrines hang together, and so I tried to offer a more or less historical sketch of the development of Stoic ethics as one way in which the pieces of the puzzle could be put together. The first five chapters can I think be read as a continuous account of Stoic theories about the goal of life and of morality; the last one deals with “freedom from emotion,” picking up what is perhaps the most strikingfeature of Stoicism . I am aware of the fact that a lot has been written on all these topics since 1984, and that it is now much easier, thanks to the sourcebook of A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge, 1987 ), to find one's way through the bewildering array of sources for Stoic doctrine .