Virtue, knowledge, and happiness: Stoic moral theory and its Socratic and Platonic antecedents

The essay which follows investigates the relationship between virtue, knowledge and happiness in the Platonic works and in orthodox Stoicism.; Chapters One and Two examine the formulation and defense of the moral views that virtue is some sort of knowledge or expertise and that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness, as they appear in the Meno, Euthydemus, and Apology. I discuss some of the dialectical difficulties Socrates faces in upholding these views and the way in which they lead to Socrates' apparent inability to defend his adopted positions. Subsequently, I examine Plato's attempt to address these difficulties in the Republic through the use of the Theory of the Forms and the account of the tripartite soul. As a result, I maintain, the Republic offers some solutions, but at the cost of significantly reformulating the relationship between virtue, knowledge and happiness.; Chapters Three and Four examine the Stoic adoption and defense of the claims that virtue is some sort of knowledge and that virtue is necessary and sufficient for happiness. I show how the Stoics seem to have been responsive to the difficulties Socrates faces when he adopts similar views in the aporetic Platonic dialogues, as well as to the Republic's proposed solutions and modifications. I claim that the Stoics appear to have employed some of the Republic's dialectical strategies in defending their own moral views. But they did so in distinctively Stoic ways, which are most evident in the Stoics' use of notions from theology and psychology in supporting their moral positions. Among these notions, I pay particular attention to the Stoic description of universal nature as a supremely rational and providential living being that determines the fate of every cosmic event and of human nature as part of nature's divine reason. By looking at the Stoics' use of these notions in defending their moral claims, I intend to show how the Stoics provide a substantial improvement to the arguments that appear in the Platonic works, and offer a moral account that is powerfully coherent and to a large extent satisfactory in supporting the Stoics' moral views.