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1 - The Stoics

from Part I - The History of Natural Law Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Tom Angier
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
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Summary

Any attempt to offer an account of natural law in Stoicism is confronted with the notorious problem of evidence. Not a single work of the ‘early’ Stoics (Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, all working in the third century BCE) has fully survived from antiquity. Reconstructions of their views depend on reports by authors who wrote much later and are in many cases anything but unbiased. The information that these authors provide usually leaves a rather wide scope for different interpretations. And the decision between these interpretations is often a matter of the general assumptions which guide our approach to the Stoics: whether we tend to think, for instance, that the early Stoics stood on common ground with their predecessors and contemporaries or whether we assume that they tried to distinguish themselves from other philosophers. As we shall see, this alternative is particularly relevant in the case of the natural law.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • The Stoics
  • Edited by Tom Angier, University of Cape Town
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics
  • Online publication: 21 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108525077.002
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  • The Stoics
  • Edited by Tom Angier, University of Cape Town
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics
  • Online publication: 21 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108525077.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Stoics
  • Edited by Tom Angier, University of Cape Town
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics
  • Online publication: 21 October 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108525077.002
Available formats
×