[MUSIC] Now, let's talk about the stoics. This is the second of the two major philosophical schools founded in Athens after the death of Aristotle. The school was founded by Zeno of Citium who was not to be confused with the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno of Elea. That Zeno was a follower of parmentites. Our Zeno grew up on the island of Cyprus and came to Athens as a young man where he steeped himself in the philosophical culture of the time. Eventually, he came to have his own following who congregated to listen to him on the painted call a day known as the Stoa Poikile, which is how his followers came to be known as the stoics. After Zeno's death, the school was led by Cleanthes. And the third head, perhaps the most famous stoic of all was Chrysippus. Chrysippus worked out detailed arguments for the positions that Zeno first articulated and he defended them against objections raised in particular by members of Plato's academy. The influence Chrysippus had on the shape and articulation of stoic philosophy is such that there was a saying in antiquity if there had been no Chrysippus there would have been no stoa. So often in our sources of stoic philosophy, it's Chrysippus not Zeno, whose works are discussed. Unfortunately, the writings of Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus suffered pretty much the same fate as those of Epicurus and the preSocratics. That is, they are mostly lost to us. But like the Epicureans, the stoics, too had adherence among Roman writers whose work have survived. In particular, we can read stoic philosophy in the works of Seneca, Epictetus and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius who were all stoic's. In addition Cicero, although he was an opponent of stoicism preserved several accounts of stoic philosophy is dialogs that he wrote. Book Three of his On Ends provides an account of stoic ethics and Book Two of On the Nature of the Gods sets for a stoic theology. And his work on fate provides a critique and defense of one of the controversial Stoic Doctrines, the Thesis of Fate. Among later writers, Diogenes Laertius in the Third century CE provides a long summary of stoic philosophy in his biography of Zeno and two centuries later the anthologist Joannes Stobaeus includes long extracts from stoic authors in a compendium of ancient wisdom that he commissioned for the benefit of his son. Stoicism would prove to be an enormously influential philosophy in the post-Hellenistic period. Where for a while, it became the dominant philosophy, even later philosophers who rejected stoic teachings adopted much of their terminology and methodology. Early Christian theologians, although they were concerned to reject Pagan philosophy, still bore the mark of the cumulative weight of many centuries of Stoicism. As it turned out, the stoics proved to have a more lasting influence in antiquity than their Epicurean rivals. Perhaps because early Christians and later Platonists were especially hostile to Epicurus. The stoics did, however, have a number of agreements with the Epicureans. They too, believed in a fully material world. Although they rejected atomism, they believed that anything that exists has to be corporeal. That is a body. They too believed in a corporeal God, although their God unlike that of the Epicureans was actively at work in every corner and level of the universe. While Epicurus was a follower of Democritus, the stoics took their inspiration from Heraclitus. They conceived of God as a designing fire that sustains the operations of the universe, but also periodically, consumes the whole cosmos in a conflagration, what they called an ekpurosis. After the conflagration, the cosmos starts all over again and unfolds exactly as it did before including the final conflagration. So the Stoics too, thought that there were infinitely, but in succession not simultaneously as Epicurus thought and they are all identical to each other. Now, this doctrine of eternal recurrence was absolutely central to stoic physics eight from the time of Zeno, but for reasons that I don't think we fully understand today. It gives rise to many puzzles about time and identity that we won't have time to address then. Our focus will be on the stoic concept of God, their thesis of fate and their ethical teachings. Where on practical matters, they had much in common with the Epicureans. While they did not agree with the Epicureans that the goal of life is ATARAXIA. They did claim that those who achieve the goal of life would experience a condition very like ATARAXIA. They called it eurhoia or a good flow of life, which involves being distressed at nothing that happens. The goal of life, however, as they saw it is not to experience this agreeable condition, but rather to live in agreement with nature as they put it. To appreciate just what this involves, we need to start with stoic natural philosophy. And in particular, with their view of the role of God in nature.
