The Stoics

The Stoics are the Hellenistic philosophical school founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BCE, continued through Chrysippus (the systematic architect of the mature doctrine), transmitted through the Middle Stoa of Panaetius and Posidonius, and given its enduring Roman form in the three great figures of the imperial Stoa: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

For the Seba lineage the Stoics are indispensable on three counts. Their doctrine of pneuma as the animating breath-fire that permeates and orders the cosmos — the world-soul in Stoic articulation — is the bridge between pre-Socratic cosmology and later Neoplatonic emanationism, and a direct antecedent of the alchemical spiritus. Their treatment of the [[pathos|pathē]] as misjudgments of value — with the therapeutic aim of apatheia (not apathy but freedom from disordered passion) — is one of the two principal classical theories of emotion, against which Aristotle‘s value-laden but not eliminable reading of the emotions stands. And their practice of prosoche — continuous attentive self-observation — is among the ancestors of the contemplative disciplines that the Seba method inherits. See long-sedley-hellenistic-philosophers, apatheia, and prosoche-stoic.

Relationships

• stoic-pneuma
• apatheia
• philosophy-as-way-of-life