A brief background on the Stoics
If you say someone is stoic, you’re almost certainly giving them a compliment, specifically that they stood strong in the face of a very bad situation. And with that sort of good PR, its probably not a surprise that Stoicism is a very popular search term on Google. In fact, ‘Stoicism’ gets 56% more hits than ‘Platonism’ and 469% more hits than ‘Aristotelianism’. Now, a lot of this is likely due to the facts that people usually search for ‘Plato’ instead of ‘Platonism’ and ‘Aristotle’ instead of ‘Aristotelianism’ and relatively few people know that Zeno of Citium founded Stoicism or even that its most well known exponent was Epictetus.
Still, the fact is that Zeno and Epictetus created and spread a philosophy that is quite famous and well respected even to the present day. And that certainly deserves a lot of respect. And I highly recommend anyone interested in how ethical philosophy influenced modern religions study the Stoics. I can’t think of a philosophy closer to Christianity than Stoicism.
Zeno of Citium
Here are four stoic books I can happily recommend:
Discourses - Epictetus
Enchiridion – Epictetus
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus
The Meditations – (Personal journal of Stoic and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius)
Read the rest at my dissertation blog
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