The Guardian Of Freedom

In this dissertation I argued that the philosophy of Epictetus is a kind of moral philosophy which aims at the attainment of happiness. In the view of Epictetus, happiness in the strict sense is incompatible with even the possibility of misery or disappointment. The differences between happiness and its opposite are absolute and there is no discrimination in degree as for happiness itself. Human being can only be situated in two pole, the happiness or the misery. Accordingly, happiness, having no any component of misery, is unconditional. Therefore, the unconditional happiness must be situated in the resources which is completely up to us. Epictetus defines the things completely up to us as "the things which under our control"."The things which under our control" is the only domain which human being can achieve its good and happiness. The object of Epictetus' whole philosophy's study is this kind of unconditional "things which under our control". Epictetus analyse and descript "the things which under our control" from different angles, that is, free volition, representation, judgement and assent, desire and avoidance, choice and refusal, and demonstrate different paths which human being can achieve its happiness. These paths are not irrelevant to each other, but have the same goal."Free volition", is the moral choice which is directly relevant to human being's good and bad. Human's good and bad can only be judged from "free volition" domain. All the things which fall outside the domain of "free volition" have no attribute of good and bad. Therefore Epictetus claims that human being should confine its concern to the domain of "free volition" and only dedicate to the perfection of its own virtue and "free volition", so that it can attains a kind of "free volition" which is in accordance with nature and achieves a kind of happy state free from passion.In Epictetus view, "representation" is not only sensual, but also rational. It closely correlate with language and conception, so that "representation" can be the object of "assent" and "judge". Because the difference between individuals over the storage of language and conception, the individual's disposal of representation is individual and how to deal with representation is an individual event. Moreover, the rational character of representation offers the possibility of representation's reconstruction. Because of the individual and rational character of representation, human being can attain a state of happiness which is free from passion through "dealing with representation correctly".Epictetus argues that there is three domains in philosophical training, that is, "the domain of desire and avoidance", "the domain of choice and refusal" and "the domain of judgement and assent". In the three domains, the most important and urgentest is "the domain of desire and avoidance". The training in the domain of desire and avoidance is related to passion. The purpose of the training is to direct human to a state of happiness which is free from passion through the achievement of knowledge over the real good and bad.The state of happiness which is free from passion, Epictetus defines it also as "freedom". It is noticeable that this kind of freedom in the sense of Epictetus is not...