The master's thesis deals with Stoic theory of human action in its non-normative dimension. Although the Stoics, like their philosophical predecessors, endorsed reason as a fundamental characteristic of human beings, they emphasized impulse (ὁρμή) as the key element of human action. The primary impulse arises in animals and children through the mechanism of self-appropriation or self-domestication (οἰκείωσις), enabling them to have spontaneous knowledge of what benefits or harms them. While impulse is unmediated by reason in animals and children, in adults, it is necessarily intertwined with reason. Impulse is a crucial element in Stoic theory of action, as well as in the theory of passions and emotional states in general. However, in adults, there exists a certain tension between desire and reason. In this master's thesis, we will attempt to inquire how this tension manifests on various levels, i.e. in determining the place of humans in nature, in describing human rational action, and in defining passions. In the first part of the master's thesis, we aim to reconstruct the image and development of the theory of action in Greek Stoic sources.
In the first century BCE and the first century CE, Stoicism also entered Rome and the Latin environment. Cicero and Seneca, each with their distinctive approaches and influential legacies, brought Stoic philosophy into this new setting. In the second part of the thesis, we will focus primarily on the conceptual and linguistic transformations these concepts underwent during this period.
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