Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions
- The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I The History of Natural Law Ethics
- 1 The Stoics
- 2 Aquinas
- 3 Grotius and Pufendorf
- Part II The Revival of Natural Law Ethics
- Part III Natural Law Ethics and Religion
- Part IV Applied Natural Law Ethics
- Part V Natural Law Ethics
- References
- Index
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions (continued from page ii)
1 - The Stoics
from Part I - The History of Natural Law Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2019
- The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions
- The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I The History of Natural Law Ethics
- 1 The Stoics
- 2 Aquinas
- 3 Grotius and Pufendorf
- Part II The Revival of Natural Law Ethics
- Part III Natural Law Ethics and Religion
- Part IV Applied Natural Law Ethics
- Part V Natural Law Ethics
- References
- Index
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions (continued from page ii)
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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- The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics , pp. 11 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019
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