Spinoza and the Stoics
Author: Firmin DeBrabander
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2007-03-15
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 9780826493934
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExamines Spinoza's moral and political philosophy and his engagement with Stoicism.
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Spinoza and the Stoics
Author: Jon Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-04-30
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 1316298132
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor many years, philosophers and other scholars have commented on the remarkable similarity between Spinoza and the Stoics, with some even going so far as to speak of 'Spinoza the Stoic'. Until now, however, no one has systematically examined the relationship between the two systems. In Spinoza and the Stoics Jon Miller takes on this task, showing how key elements of Spinoza's metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical psychology, and ethics relate to their Stoic counterparts. Drawing on a wide range of secondary literature including the most up-to-date scholarship and a close examination of the textual evidence, Jon Miller not only reveals the sense in which Spinoza was, and was not, a Stoic, but also offers new insights into how each system should be understood in itself. His book will be of great interest to scholars and students of ancient philosophy, early modern philosophy, Spinoza, and the philosophy of the Stoics.
Spinoza and the Stoics
Author: Firmin DeBrabander
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2007-01-15
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 1441143661
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis important book examines Spinoza's moral and political philosophy. Specifically it considers Spinoza's engagement with the themes of Stoicism and his significant contribution to the origins of the European Enlightenment. Firmin DeBrabander explores the problematic view of the relationship between ethics and politics that Spinoza apparently inherited from the Stoics and in so doing asks some important questions that contribute to a crucial contemporary debate. Does ethics provide any foundation for political theory and if so in what way? Likewise, does politics contribute anything essential to the life of virtue? And what is the political place and public role of the philosopher as a practitioner of ethics? In examining Spinoza's Ethics, his most important and widely-read work, and exploring the ways in which this work echoes Stoic themes regarding the public behaviour of the philosopher, the author seeks to answer these key questions and thus makes a fascinating contribution to the study of moral and political philosophy.
The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics
Author: Brad Inwood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-05-05
Total Pages: 452
ISBN-13: 9780521779852
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis unique volume offers an odyssey through the ideas of the Stoics in three particular ways: first, through the historical trajectory of the school itself and its influence; second, through the recovery of the history of Stoic thought; third, through the ongoing confrontation with Stoicism, showing how it refines philosophical traditions, challenges the imagination, and ultimately defines the kind of life one chooses to lead. A distinguished roster of specialists have written an authoritative guide to the entire philosophical tradition. The first two chapters chart the history of the school in the ancient world, and are followed by chapters on the core themes of the Stoic system: epistemology, logic, natural philosophy, theology, determinism, and metaphysics. There are two chapters on what might be thought of as the heart and soul of the Stoics system: ethics.
Reason, Religion, and Natural Law
Author: Jonathan A. Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-10-19
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 0199995923
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis edited volume examines the realizations between theological considerations and natural law theorizing, from Plato to Spinoza. Theological considerations have long had a pronounced role in Catholic natural law theories, but have not been as thoroughly examined from a wider perspective. The contributors to this volume take a more inclusive view of the relation between conceptions of natural law and theistic claims and principles. They do not jointly defend one particular thematic claim, but articulate diverse ways in which natural law has both been understood and related to theistic claims. In addition to exploring Plato and the Stoics, the volume also looks at medieval Jewish thought, the thought of Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, and the ways in which Spinoza's thought includes resonances of earlier views and intimations of later developments. Taken as a whole, these essays enlarge the scope of the discussion of natural law through study of how the naturalness of natural law has often been related to theses about the divine. The latter are often crucial elements of natural law theorizing, having an integral role in accounting for the metaethical status and ethical bindingness of natural law. At the same time, the question of the relation between natural law and God-and the relation between natural law and divine command-has been addressed in a multiplicity of ways by key figures throughout the history of natural law theorizing, and these essays accord them the explanatory significance they deserve.
A New Stoicism
Author: Lawrence C. Becker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-08-29
Total Pages: 283
ISBN-13: 1400888387
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat would stoic ethics be like today if stoicism had survived as a systematic approach to ethical theory, if it had coped successfully with the challenges of modern philosophy and experimental science? A New Stoicism proposes an answer to that question, offered from within the stoic tradition but without the metaphysical and psychological assumptions that modern philosophy and science have abandoned. Lawrence Becker argues that a secular version of the stoic ethical project, based on contemporary cosmology and developmental psychology, provides the basis for a sophisticated form of ethical naturalism, in which virtually all the hard doctrines of the ancient Stoics can be clearly restated and defended. Becker argues, in keeping with the ancients, that virtue is one thing, not many; that it, and not happiness, is the proper end of all activity; that it alone is good, all other things being merely rank-ordered relative to each other for the sake of the good; and that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Moreover, he rejects the popular caricature of the stoic as a grave figure, emotionally detached and capable mainly of endurance, resignation, and coping with pain. To the contrary, he holds that while stoic sages are able to endure the extremes of human suffering, they do not have to sacrifice joy to have that ability, and he seeks to turn our attention from the familiar, therapeutic part of stoic moral training to a reconsideration of its theoretical foundations.
Spinoza
Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: 1988-04
Total Pages: 148
ISBN-13: 9780872862180
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSpinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science. Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher; and this reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, "Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence." Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics, and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, ""Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount. Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes. Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.
Stoicism
Author: Steven K. Strange
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004-06-21
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9781139453769
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStoicism is now widely recognised as one of the most important philosophical schools of ancient Greece and Rome. But how did it influence Western thought after Greek and Roman antiquity? The question is a difficult one to answer because the most important Stoic texts have been lost since the end of the classical period, though not before early Christian thinkers had borrowed their ideas and applied them to discussions ranging from dialectic to moral theology. Later philosophers became familiar with Stoic teachings only indirectly, often without knowing that an idea came from the Stoics. The contributors recruited for this volume, first published in 2004, include some of the leading international scholars of Stoicism as well as experts in later periods of philosophy. They trace the impact of Stoicism and Stoic ideas from late antiquity through the medieval and modern periods.
Stoics and Sceptics
Author: Edwyn Robert Bevan
Publisher:
Published: 1913
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTHE SPIRIT OF SPINOZA
Author: Neal Grossman
Publisher: ICRL Press
Published: 2014-05-02
Total Pages: 275
ISBN-13: 1936033089
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBENEDICT SPINOZA was a 17th-century philosopher and spiritual psychotherapist. This intellectual self-help book provides important insights from Spinoza’s system of thought in a format accessible to the general reader, as well as to those already familiar with his philosophy. By applying his method to our personal lives, we may free ourselves from bondage to our lower emotions and habitual behaviors and thus begin to enjoy the “continuous, supreme, and unending happiness” promised by Spinoza. “Those of us who came of age in the twentieth century were taught that we must adopt a crazy-making strategy of compartmentalizing our lives, putting our rational, scientific side into one corner and our psychological/spiritual side in another. The precarious state of our world is evidence enough that this approach to life is a destructive dead end. You are holding an effective alternative in your hand. The Spirit of Spinoza is a brilliant treatise that has been field-tested by Professor Neal Grossman in his own life and that of his students over decades. This book is a master stroke by a master teacher about a master philosopher. It is also delightfully dangerous, for it has the power to shift one’s life onto a new axis, where it becomes possible to blend knowledge and wisdom into an experience that can best be described, quite simply, as waking up.” —Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters
