Abstract

Comparisons between early Chinese Daoism and ancient Greco-Roman Stoicism have recently become quite popular with scholars working in Sino-Western comparative philosophy. It has been pointed out that there are fundamental similarities between the two schools in their commitment to the ideal of "following nature" or in their views about emotional detachment. In this comparative article, I would like to suggest that these similarities are even deeper than has so far been acknowledged, and that the existing differences between the two schools, which we can grasp against this background of robust similarities, are therefore bound to be particularly pertinent with regard to our...