Stoicism During Its Greek Period

For my next paper, I decided to focus on a topic that I have heard about in other philosophy classes several times, Stoicism. Stoicism is one of those topics where I know I have had it explained to me several times, but I can never fully explain it to someone if they ask: hence, why I wanted to research it. The purpose of this paper is to discuss Stoicism during its Greek phase, following along with it historically, and pointing out particularly important people/changes in their lines of though. The first two periods of Stoicism are what constitutes as “Greek Stoicism”, the first period starts with the founding of the school of Stoa by Zeno and the second period concludes when the biggest school of thoughts moves from Athens to Rome. One of

This lead the Stoics to believe in neutral external goods that are still naturally pursued. Zeno, being both creator and member of Stoicism formed their belief structure, leading to their devotion in the fields of logic, ethics, and physics. The Stoics ethics drew from Cynicism, as previously mentioned; their physics were influenced by Plato’s Timaeus; and their logic covered epistemology, which landed in the empiricist-naturalistic camp, and what we call formal logic

Cleanthes and Chrysippus that were mentioned earlier argued on the unity of the virtues. They did so because Zeno taught that each virtue was a kind of wisdom. This lead to Cleanthes believing that there was only one virtue, wisdom itself, while at the same time Chrysippus believed that each virtue was kind of an off shoot of wisdom. The defense of some early Stoics was often considered to be stubborn and would completely go against the evidence that would be given. For example, Chrysippus argued that the heart was where intelligence came from instead of the brain, which went against an almost completely definite agreement based on evidence that those in the Hellenistic period already had. Stoics would eventually turn away from this belief.

Even though he kind of dropped the ball rather hard on this issue, Chrysippus was without a doubt one of, if not the most influential Stoic philosopher. Chrysippus revived the school after it had declined when Cleanthes was leading it. Chrysippus is also responsible for changing some of its teachings and introducing quite a few ideas in logic, which is the most influential part Stoicism had in the world of philosophy. “Famously, Diogenes Laertius (2015, VII.183) wrote that ‘But for Chrysippus, there had been no