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Stoic Eudaimonism and the Natural Law Tradition1
Abstract
Stoic ethical thought is sometimes regarded as a transition from teleological accounts of morality to modern or deontological accounts. Yet any such claims about Stoic ethics need to be understood in light of the Stoics' well-attested commitment to eudaimonism. This chapter argues that this commitment is best understood as a commitment to rational eudaimonism in particular and that Stoic ethics, as such, is not correctly regarded as a departure from the teleological framework characteristic of Platonic and Aristotelian theories. Although the Stoics appropriate the notion of nomos to characterize the natural order, and although they regard this order as a source of virtue's content, the Stoic conception of natural law does not imply a source of obligation independent of eudaimonist considerations.
... Therefore, it is "a dispositional rather than rule-following model of natural law." 35 Klein (2012), 80. This is why it is best to let the history of the idea of a rule-based natural law begin with Cicero rather than with the Greek Stoics. ...
This article seeks to show the importance of Cicero for Kant by pointing out the systematic relationship between their respective views on ethics and law. Cicero was important to Kant because Cicero had already elaborated an imperative, “quasi-jural” conception of duty or obligation. Cicero had also already prefigured the distinction between ethical duties and duties of justice. The article does not establish any direct historical influence, but points out interesting systematic overlaps. The most important in the realm of ethics are a universal rationalism; a rule-based normative framework of duty; and skepticism about (Cicero), or rejection of (Kant), eudaimonism. In the realm of political theory, it is the centrality of law and of property that unites both thinkers; both reject voluntarism in thinking that consensus flows from the right external laws, not the other way around, and thus creates a juridical community; and lastly, both Cicero and Kant believe that transparence, or publicity, is a key ideal that might be presupposed by both the ethical and the juridical domain. The article thus shows that both Cicero and Kant separate ethics from law, but there are indications that neither has given up the aspiration to bridge the two realms on a higher plane. This reading of Kant yields both a more Ciceronian Kant and allows us to perceive Kantian aspects of Cicero.
The self-help movement has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry in the 21st Century, as bookstores are continually replenished with manuals advertising previously undiscovered secrets of achieving happiness. These publications, however, along with newly refined versions of psychotherapeutic methodologies promising groundbreaking clinical impact, are often simply repackaging wisdom found in the ancient philosophical school of Stoicism; sometimes acknowledged, but more often not. Stoics were the first psychotherapists, and advocated for the reduction of suffering (today successfully done with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) and the promotion of Eudaimonia (a rare point of emphasis in modern treatment plans, though Positive Psychology has begun to successfully change this). Psychotherapeutic practice is caught in a loop of rediscovering truths that have been known for millennia, perpetuating a cycle of stagnation in the field of mental health that masquerades as innovation. The present article is a call to disrupt this cycle, and instead reconnect with Stoicism’s ancient guidance on how to flourish and live excellently, rather than continue to resell its wisdom using other names.
In Section 1, I outline the history of natural law theory, covering Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas. In Section 2, I explore two alternative traditions of natural law, and explain why these constitute rivals to the Aristotelian tradition. In Section 3, I go on to elaborate a via negativa along which natural law norms can be discovered. On this basis, I unpack what I call three 'experiments in being', each of which illustrates the cogency of this method. In Section 4, I investigate and rebut two seminal challenges to natural law methodology, namely, the fact/value distinction in metaethics and Darwinian evolutionary biology. In Section 5, I then outline and criticise the 'new' natural law theory, which is an attempt to revise natural law thought in light of the two challenges above. I conclude, in Section 6, with a summary and some reflections on the prospects for natural law theory.
This articles focuses on a significant change to the curriculum in “ethics” (moral philosophy) in the University of Naples, superintended by Celestino Galiani, the rector of the university (1732–53), and Antonio Genovesi, Galiani's protégé and the university's professor of ethics (1746–54). The article contends that Galiani's and Genovesi's sympathies lay with the form of “modern natural law” pioneered by Hugo Grotius and his followers in Northern Europe. The transformation of curricular ethics in Protestant contexts had stemmed from an anxiety about its relevance in the face of moral skepticism. The article shows how this anxiety affected a Catholic context, and it responds to John Robertson's contention that Giambattista Vico's use of “sacred history” in his Scienza nuova (1725, revised 1730, 1744) typified a search among Catholics for an alternative to “scholastic natural law,” when the latter was found insufficiently to explain the sources of human sociability.
I argue that Plato, in the Timaeus, draws deep theoretical distinctions between sensation and affect, which comprises pleasure, pain, desire and emotion. Sensation (but not affect) is both 'fine-grained' (having orderly causal connections with its fundamental explanatory items) and 'immediate' (being provoked absent any mediating psychological state). Emotions, by contrast, are mediated and coarse-grained. Pleasure and pain are coarse-grained but, in a range of important cases, immediate. The Theaetetus assimilates affect to sensation in a way the Timaeus does not. Smell frustrates Timaeus because it is coarse-grained, although unlike pleasure and pain it is so by accident of physiology.
The study of Maximus the Confessor’s thought has flourished in recent years: international conferences, publications and articles, new critical editions and translations mark a torrent of interest in the work and influence of perhaps the most sublime of the Byzantine Church Fathers. It has been repeatedly stated that the Confessor’s thought is of eminently philosophical interest. However, no dedicated collective scholarly engagement with Maximus the Confessor as a philosopher has taken place—and this volume attempts to start such a discussion. Apart from Maximus’ relevance and importance for philosophy in general, a second question arises: should towering figures of Byzantine philosophy like Maximus the Confessor be included in an overview of the European history of philosophy, or rather excluded from it—as is the case today with most histories of European philosophy? Maximus’ philosophy challenges our understanding of what European philosophy is. In this volume, we begin to address these issues and examine numerous aspects of Maximus’ philosophy—thereby also stressing the interdisciplinary character of Maximian studies.
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