Aristotle vs the Stoics: part II, ethics
Were the Stoics just copying Aristotle? Spoiler alert: not really.
Did the Stoics come up with an innovative, powerful philosophy of life? Or did they just take Aristotle’s stuff, changed the language here and there, and called it a day? The possibility has often been raised, all the way back to Cicero’s On the Ends of Good and Evil, that Stoicism may differ more in wording than in substance from its Aristotelian counterpart. Is that true?
I have explored the issue at a recent workshop in practical philosophy that I have co-organized in Athens together with my colleagues John Sellars and Rob Colter. In the first installment of this two-part series we have seen some of the significant differences between Stoicism and Aristotelianism in terms of metaphysics (the nature of the cosmos, god, and the soul) as well as in the area of logic (term vs propositional). Time now to turn to the third classical field of study of ancient philosophy, providing us with the most crucial comparison: ethics.
Ethics: virtue and all that jazz
Ethics, for the Stoics, is the most important aspect of their system, though I’m not sure Aristotle would say the same in his case. And that may be the crucial difference between the two: the Stoics really aimed at a practical philosophy of…
