How can Stoicism help me with my problem? It is common for those new to Stoicism to ask what it has to say for a variety of situations: how to get along with family members, how to find a romantic partner, how to cope with the death of a loved one, how to deal with an abusive boss, and any number of other (often serious) problems. To respond to these questions, one needs to step back and think about exactly what kind of answer is being sought, what kinds of answers Stoicism (or any other phi...

What motivates a Stoic? Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, is said to have become interested in philosophy after reading from the second volume of Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates, which contains Prodicus's fable of Heracles at the crossroads, in which a young Heracles (a.k.a. Hercules) has to make a choice between following the "easy" road of vice, or the hard road of virtue, and chooses virtue over vice. Inspired, Zeno asked the bookseller where such men could be found, and was told...

Why study Stoicism? Stoicism is a philosophy primarily concerned with finding the best way to live one's life, in figuring out how to flourish as human beings. It is one of a family of such philosophies developed in the Hellenistic period of Mediterranean history. Stoicism’s rivals included Epicureanism, Skepticism, Peripateticism, and Cynicism, each of which was similar to Stoicism in some ways, and different in others. Is Stoicism something I have to believe in, or commit my life to? T...

Is it true that Stoics repress their emotions and feelings? The Greek word pathos (πάθος) is often translated as "emotion" in English, but the Greek word (at least in the context of Stoic philosophy) does not refer to everything the English word "emotion" denotes. The Stoics did consider many emotions to be pathoi, including all emotions that might cause one to act other than according to one's conscience and best judgement, or otherwise disrupt one's life. (See Cicero's On Ends 3.35 (end of...

Were the classical Stoics determinists? Yes. They asserted that there are no effects (changes or differences in state of a body) that are not determined by causes, and that a "chain" of causes results in all that happens. Because their cosmology was eternal and cyclic, they didn't even have a need for a initial uncaused cause to get things going. From Gellius's Attic Nights: Chrysippus, the leader of the Stoic philosophy, defined fate, which the Greeks call εἱμαρμένη, in about the followin...

What are some similarities and differences between Stoicism and Cynicism? They had very different ideas on what it meant to be virtuous, and what "Nature" referred to. For the Cynics, it meant rejecting society entirely and living as homeless people, and trying to get others to do the same. For the Stoics, it meant working as part of society, for the good of mankind. For the Stoics, although virtue was the only good, some externals were to be preferred over others, and virtue was tied up in dea...

Miscellaneous questions What about things that are partially under our control? Epictetus's Enchiridion opens with the famous categorization of things into those that are in our control (also translated "in our power," "up to us," or "attributable to us") and those that are not. In Matheson's translation: Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our ow...

What is meant by a "preferred" or "unpreferred" indifferent? The terms "preferred indifferent" and "unpreferred indifferent", translations of the terms προηγμένα/proêgmena and ἀπροηγμένα/aproêgmena, seem inherently self-contradictory. They are less paradoxical when it is understood that the Stoics identified three distinct senses of the word "value." In one sense, something is of value if its presence can improve (or its absence detract) from the quality of a person's life (that it is truly goo...

What does it mean to live in accordance with nature? The ancient Greek conception of nature was different from the modern one. The Greek word commonly translated as "nature," φύσις/physis, is derived from the Greek verb φύειν, meaning "to grow," referring either to the origin of something (that from which it grew), the process of growth itself, or the full completion of growth (maturity). Its first use in the context of philosophy was by the pre-Socratics, roughly 300 years before the founding...

What did the Stoics mean by "virtue?" When applied to humans in the context of Stoic ethics, ἀρετή/arete (usually translated as "virtue") meant something like "excellence of character," and kalos/κάλος (sometimes translated as "virtuous," but sometimes "honorable" or "becoming" instead) meant "morally beautiful." The Stoics thought that the two referred to the same thing. There are two basic approaches to describing in more detail what the Stoics meant by "virtuous:" practical, and theoretical....

Do Stoics believe in God, or gods? The answer about Stoic theism is usually rather different for modern people who self-identify as Stoics and the classical Greek and Roman view. There are some modern people who share the ancient view. Modern people of a variety of different views about theology have been strongly influenced by Stoicism, but atheists and agnostics are more likely to self-identify as Stoics; comparably influenced theists usually still self-identify with the religion that hold...