Stoicism and anti-Stoicism in European philosophy and political thought, 1640--1795

Both the sixteenth and the eighteenth century uses of Stoic ideas have been the objects of close study in recent years. This dissertation builds an historical bridge between these two bodies of work, describing the contours of the ongoing arguments about the interpretation and assessment of Roman and Greek Stoicism during a period of crucial importance for the development of modern European philosophy and political thought, form the emergence of the new philosophies of Grotius, Descartes and Hobbes to the High Enlightenment.; The dissertation argues that distinctive Catholic and Protestant traditions of anti-Stoic traditions developed over the course of the seventeenth century in response to the popularity of Neo-Stoic ideologies. French Augustinians, including Jansen, Senault, Pascal and Malebranche, concentrated on the moral psychology of the Stoics and argued that Stoicism was an erroneous—indeed, heretical—philosophy of free will rooted in pride; the Protestant critics from Bramhall and Cudworth to Bayle, by contrast, tended to focus their arguments on topics in Stoic physics, and argued that Stoicism presented a pernicious philosophy of determinism. The thesis argues that the increasing philosophical interest in Marxus Aurelius's Stoicism in the second half of the seventeenth cenutry in part owes to its relative immunity from the central arguments of the Augustinian anti-Stoic critique; and shows how the controversies surrounding Spinoza's philosophy at the end of the century helped to generate the surprising verdict that the Stoics taught atheism.; The final part of the dissertation then delineates the legacy of these arguments for and against Stoic philosophy for the European Enlightenment. First, it shows how Stoicism was integrated both into the eclectic historiography of philosophy in the early Enlightenment and into the post-Augustinian arguments of the British Moralists, including Shaftesbury and Butler. Then it turns to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and argues that the seventeenth-century encounter between Stoicism and its critics is of considerable importance in understanding the foundations of Rousseau's political thought, as he searches for ways of working with and against the legacy of the Stoics and the French Augustinians in the construction of a theory of radical democracy.