En el contexto de su crítica a la fenomenomenología husserliana Michel Henry apela a la caracterización de los errores de la perspectiva hetero-afectiva remitiéndose a sus orígenes en la tradición sintetizados en los parámetros de la “gnosis griega” y su compromiso con la racionalidad entendida como comprensión de “objetos puestos a distancia”. La revisión de los alcances de esta categoría revela, sin embargo, que existen tratamientos en el pensamiento griego que apelan a la auto-afección y la inmanencia para dar cuenta (...) de elementos que exceden la dimensión ek-stática. En este trabajo se revisa el planteo henryano para mostrar sus puntos de contacto con el estoicismo, especialmente a partir de la teoría de Hierocles a propósito de la oikeîosis. Este recorrido permitirá sugerir que entre ambos planteos existe una compatibilidad estructural que hace posible apelar a claves de interpretación similares para dar cuenta de la convivencia de mecanismos de explicación que apelan a lo auto-afectivo y lo hétero-afectivo en un conjunto coherente. (shrink)

The most important parent of the idea of property in the person is undoubtedly John Locke. In this article, we argue that the origins of this idea can be traced back as far as the third century BCE, to classical Stoicism. Stoic cosmopolitanism, with its insistence on impartiality and the moral equality of all persons, lays the foundation for the idea of self-ownership, which is then given support in the doctrine of oikeiosis and the corresponding belief that nature had made (...) all human beings equal, self-preserving, and self-regarding. On the Stoic account, self-ownership is a natural correlate and consequence of oikeiosis, the natural urge to self-preservation, proprioception, and the individuation that came with it. In recognising that people are separate and individual, and entrusting each individual’s welfare to herself, Zeus appears to make everyone a ‘self-guardian’. We uniquely argue that Locke was directly inspired by these Stoic ideas, which he then develops and incorporates into his own theory. (shrink)

Istvan Hont’s classic work on the theoretical links between the seventeenth-century natural jurists Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century Scottish political economists remains a popular trope among intellectual and economic historians of various stamps. Despite this, a common criticism levelled at Hont remains his relative lack of engagement with the relationship between religion and economics in the early modern period. This paper challenges this aspect of Hont’s narrative by drawing attention to an alternative, albeit complementary, assessment of the (...) natural jurisprudential heritage of eighteenth-century British political economy. Specifically, the article attempts to map on to Hont’s thesis the Christian Stoic interpretation of Grotius and Pufendorf which has gained greater currency in recent years. In doing so, the paper argues that Grotius and Pufendorf’s contributions to the ‘unsocial sociability’ debate do not necessarily lead directly to the Scottish school of political economists, as is commonly assumed. Instead, it contends that a reconsideration of Grotius and Pufendorf as neo-Stoic theorists, particularly via scrutiny of their respective adaptations of the traditional Stoic theory of oikeiosis, steers us towards the heart of the early English ‘clerical’ Enlightenment. (shrink)