The Stoic philosophy has been for a very long time understood as a philosophy of asceticism; a sheer misunderstanding! Actually, this philosophy represents a form of natural rationality which contains its epistemology, logic and physical theory. Moreover, this philosophy paves the way for the development of ethics in general and that of Western moral theory in particular. The well known philosophers like Rousseau and Kant also developed their moral philosophies by incorporating the Stoic ideas into their systems. Most importantly, the Stoic philosophy is the only school in the history of Western philosophy being famous in the field of ethics without attributing to any specific philosopher for this line of thinking. There is no one particular philosopher who happened to be the origin of the theory. This has a great deal to do with the cultural exchanges taking place in the Hellenisitic period of the West after the establishment of Greek Empire after Alexander the Great. Through the encounters of the cultures, the West has imported certain Oriental ideas like natural rationality, the combination of the heavens and the earth, the moral perfection of sages, the fate and destination, etc.
This course will take the advantages of this cultural characteristic by employing them for a better understanding of the Chinese culture and the philosophy it contains. We intend to launch an academic effort by linking the nature of Chinese moral theory to some ideas of the Stoic philosophy. With this approach, we attempt to see a more coherent picture of understanding that why some ideas in the Chinese philosophy are easy to be captured if we interpret them from a Stoic point of view.