This volume contains the first critical edition and translation of Barlaam of Seminara's fourteenth century treatise Ethics According to the Stoics , along with a series of interpretative essays explaining its content and context. Barlaam's text is the earliest interpretative work written on Stoic ethics, a product of the burgeoning Italian Renaissance but also drawing on Barlaam's experience in the Byzantine intellectual world of Constantinople. Intriguingly, it offers a radically different account of the Stoic theory of emotions to the one (...) known from other sources, possibly taken from sources accessible to Barlaam but now lost. The volume includes interpretative essays on each of the two books of Barlaam's treatise, along with a biographical introduction and an essay setting out the wider context of the reception of Stoicism in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. (shrink)

Epictetus’ discussion of the death of spouse and child in Encheiridion 3 raises interesting problems on the meaning of “person” in his Stoic philosophy. The author uses Epictetus’ discussion as a window into his notion of person, and weighs the strengths and weaknesses of that notion. The Stoic view of personrepresents an advance over pre-Stoic views. It offers us a better way to look at significant others throughout life, and helps us better to deal with their loss. Yet it falls (...) short of being a fully satisfactory notion of person, because it does not address the fact that I am constituted as person only in relationship to others who are themselves persons. (shrink)

Epictetus’ discussion of the death of spouse and child in Encheiridion 3 raises interesting problems on the meaning of “person” in his Stoic philosophy. The author uses Epictetus’ discussion as a window into his notion of person, and weighs the strengths and weaknesses of that notion. The Stoic view of person represents an advance over pre-Stoic views. It offers us a better way to look at significant others throughout life, and helps us better to deal with their loss. Yet it (...) falls short of being a fully satisfactory notion of person, because it does not address the fact that I am constituted as person only in relationship to others who are themselves persons. (shrink)