The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T. Cicero, With a Sketch of the Greek Philosophers Mentioned by CiceroCicero, Marcus Tullius
Philosophy
The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T. Cicero, With a Sketch of the Greek Philosophers Mentioned by Cicero
Cicero, Marcus Tullius
Ethics -- Early works to 1800; Happiness -- Early works to 1800
there was nothing good except virtue, and nothing evil except what was
contrary to virtue; and who denied altogether the existence of those
influences which Zeno contended for as being intermediate, and neither
good nor evil. His idea of the chief good, is being affected in neither
direction by these circumstances; and this state of mind he calls
ἀδιαφορία; but Pyrrho asserts that the wise man does not even feel them;
and that state is called ἀπάθεια.
To say nothing, then, of all these opinions, let us now examine those
others which have been long and vigorously maintained. Some have accounted
pleasure the chief good; the chief of whom was Aristippus, who had been a
pupil of Socrates, and from whom the Cyrenaic school spring. After him
came Epicurus, whose school is now better known, though he does not
exactly agree with the Cyrenaics about pleasure itself. But Callipho
thought that pleasure and honour combined made up the chief good.
Hieronymus placed it in being free from all annoyance; Diodorus in this
state when combined with honour. Both these last men were Peripatetics. To
live honourably, enjoying those things which nature makes most dear to
man, was the definition both of the Old Academy, (as we may learn from the
writings of Polemo, who is highly approved of by Antiochus,) and of
Aristotle, and it is the one to which his friends appear now to come
nearest. Carneades also introduced a definition, (not because he approved
of it himself, but for the sake of opposition to the Stoics,) that the
chief good is to enjoy those things which nature has made man consider as
most desirable. But Zeno laid it down that that honourableness which
arises from conformity to nature is the chief good. And Zeno was the
founder and chief of the Stoic school.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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