A Guide to StoicismStock, St. George William Joseph
Philosophy
A Guide to Stoicism
Stock, St. George William Joseph
Stoics
The Stoics had a tremendous reputation for logic. In this department
they were the successors or rather the supersessors of Aristotle. For
after the death of Theophrastus the library of the Lyceum is said to
have been buried underground at Scepsis until about a century before
Christ, So that the Organon may actually have been lost to the world
during that period. At all events under Strato the successor of
Theophrastus who specialized in natural science the school had lost
its comprehensiveness. Cicero even finds it consonant with dramatic
propriety to make Cato charge the later Peripatetics with ignorance
of logic! On the other hand Chrysippus became so famous for his logic
as to create a general impression that if there were a logic among
the gods it would be no other than the Chrysippean.
But if the Stoics were strong in logic they were weak in rhetoric.
This strength and weakness were characteristic of the school at all
periods. Cato is the only Roman Stoic to whom Cicero accords the
praise of real eloquence. In the dying accents of the school as we
hear them in Marcus Aurelius the imperial sage counts it a thing to
be thankful for that he had learnt to abstain from rhetoric, poetic,
and elegance of diction. The reader however cannot help wishing that
he had taken some means to diminish the crabbedness of his style. If
a lesson were wanted in the importance of sacrificing to the Graces
it might be found in the fact that the early Stoic writers despite
their logical subtlety have all perished and that their remains have
to be sought for so largely in the pages of Cicero. In speaking of
logic as one of the three departments of philosophy we must bear in
mind that the term was one of much wider meaning than it is with us.
It included rhetoric, poetic, and grammar as well as dialectic or
logic proper, to say nothing of disquisitions on the senses and the
intellect which we should now refer to psychology.
Logic as a whole being divided into rhetoric and dialectic: rhetoric
was defined to be the knowledge of how to speak well in expository
discourses and dialectic as the knowledge of how to argue rightly in
matters of question and answer. Both rhetoric and dialectic were
spoken of by the Stoics as virtues for they divided virtue in its
most generic sense in the same way as they divided philosophy into
physical, ethical, and logical. Rhetoric and dialectic were thus the
two species of logical virtue. Zeno expressed their difference by
comparing rhetoric to the palm and dialectic to the fist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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