Workshop in Ancient Philosophy (Thursday - Week 8, HT25)

Abstract: The Stoic corpus offers two, competing accounts of the grounds of other-oriented ethical concern: one according to which concern for others is grounded in love of oneself and one according to which it is grounded in love of reason as such. I argue that the same, competing accounts are found in Plato’s Republic and that the Stoics inherited their accounts from Plato. I make my case, in part, by showing that the Stoics were already drawing on these passages to develop their theory of oikeiōsis. Their accounts of other-oriented ethical concern are, so to speak, byproducts of this more fundamental intellectual debt. A major implication of the paper is that Plato’s influence on the Stoic theory of oikeiōsis is stronger than has been recognized.