In his version of this Stoic doctrine, the wise person will never strive for or aim unconditionally to retain anything that could not be reliably secured by his or her own efforts—and that is the improvement of his or her own character and intellectual condition.

Like Plato in the Timaeus the Stoics regarded the cosmos as something alive; but while Plato had a separate creator god animate the world by giving it a soul the Stoics show a preference for a radically unified conception of the cosmos. There is a divinity that makes the cosmos alive, but it is material and immanent throughout the cosmos, being cal

beauty, consistency, and orderliness are even more worth preserving in the domain of deliberation and action,

Chrysippus they developed a version of a position now labelled ‘compatibilism’, which maintains that full causal determination is compatible with meaningful choices made by human beings. Our actions, the Stoics proposed, are the product of two factors, stimuli from our environmental circumstances (usually referred to as ‘impressions’) and reactions

The ability to give or withhold assent to an impression is the fundamental power that our rationality gives us for dealing with the outside world;

The differences between rocks, plants, animals, and humans are all attributable to differences in the form of the pneuma that shapes the raw material in them.

even though my actions are causally determined, they are very much my own; personal agency is preserved.

ΦΒΚ(Phi Beta Kappa) takes its name from this conception; the Greek letters stand for philosophia biou kubernētēs ‘philosophy is the steersman of life’,

the repetition of the world cycles is an issue of only theoretical interest to humans, since our lives are confined to one of the cycles. It is clear that the Stoics believed that the recurring cycles are essentially the same, but there seems to have been some disagreement about whether their eternal recurrence involves exactly identical objects an