School · 334 BCE–180 CE
Stoicism
Stoics joined logic, a providential material cosmology, and ethics around the claim that virtue and rational assent can make a person free amid events beyond their control.
Shared questions
- How can rational agents live in agreement with nature within a causally ordered cosmos?
Internal disagreements
- How to reconcile providence, causal determinism, responsibility, emotion, and the value of external goods.
Key texts
- Discourses — Epictetus wrote nothing; the Discourses are notes taken by his student Arrian.
- Meditations — Marcus Aurelius' private notebook, not written for publication and untitled by him.
- Letters to Lucilius — Seneca's letters combine Stoic instruction with a literary form of his own devising.