In a vivid re-creation of late sixteenth-century Flemish intellectual life, Mark Morford explores the intertwined careers of one of the period's most influential thinkers and one of its most original artists: Justus Lipsius and Peter Paul Rubens. He investigates the scholarship of Lipsius (1547-1606), whose revival of Roman Stoicism guided his contemporaries during the revolt of the Netherlands from the rule of Spain and whose teaching prepared future leaders in church and state. Maintaining that Lipsius' thought reached Peter Paul Rubens (...) through his brother, Philip Rubens, Morford analyzes the artist's use of Stoic philosophical and political allegory, beginning with his painting The Four Philosophers. This book discusses the revival of Stoicism in northern Europe, focusing on Lipsius' editions of Tacitus and Seneca, his widely read handbooks on constancy and politics, and his interaction with leading scholars and public figures. As his letters reveal, Lipsius was inconsistent in his life and unsuccessful in reconciling Stoicism with Catholic doctrine; Rubens, although at first sympathetic to the doctrines of Lipsius, is shown to have later transcended their limitations. (shrink)

My dissertation focuses on the moral philosophy of Descartes, Pascal, and Spinoza in the context of the revival of Stoicism within the seventeenth century. There are many misinterpretations about early modern ethical theories due to a lack of proper awareness of Stoicism in the early modern period. My project rectifies this by highlighting understated Stoic themes in these early modern texts that offer new clarity to their morality. Although these three philosophers hold very different metaphysical commitments, each embraces a different (...) aspect of Stoicism, letting it influence but not define his work. By addressing the Stoic themes on the morality of these three authors, I also hope to help better capture the intellectual climate of the time by bringing Stoic themes into the foreground. Stoicism is a Hellenistic philosophy that considered the passions a sickness of the intellect and the source of all human suffering; they believed the cure was virtue, which was obtained through replacing irrational passions with rational beliefs. Stoicism had a revival in the Renaissance ushering in a wave of Neostoic authors who play an important role in shaping the intellectual landscape of the following centuries. My first two chapters discuss Descartes, who wrote a “provisional morality” early in his public life, only (as I show) to ignore the subject of ethics until near his death. In my first chapter I argue that, though many present-day scholars misread Descartes’ first ethics as part of his final ethics, this earliest “provisional morality” mimics Neostoic Skeptics such as Montaigne and is provisional because his method of doubt is also provisional. In my second chapter I show that Descartes’ late, and more developed, moral theory attempts to synthesize a variety of ancient, and seemingly contradictory, ethical traditions: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism. In many ways Descartes embraces Stoic morality, but as a mechanist he does not view passions as an intellectual sickness; rather they are a physiological event, an amoral instrument that can be used to help control one’s irrational desires. I further defend my thesis externally by showing that this is the reading supported by Descartes’ contemporaries including critics such as Leibniz and early Cartesians such as Antoine Le Grand and Pierre-Sylvain Régis My third chapter discusses Pascal, who embraces Stoicism differently. Pascal offers Stoicism as the first tier of a binary ethics: modeled after Augustine’s city of God and city of man, it is an alternative moral code for those who are ignorant of the good and true happiness. Finally, in my fourth chapter, I discuss two common misinterpretations of Spinoza’s ethics: one of them neglects the Stoic influence on his thought while the other embraces it too strongly, portraying him as an unadulterated Stoic. Although there are ways that he is more Stoic than Descartes and Pascal, such as in his panpsychism and monism, this does not extend to his morality. Rather than accepting either of the two readings, I highlight anti- Stoic themes that are also present. I conclude that if the discussion is contained to his morality, Spinoza is no more Stoic than the other Neostoics I discuss in previous chapters. (shrink)

Lipsius’ De constantia, 17th Century Still Life Painting and the Use of Constancy Today. The present article revisits the main ideas from Justus Lipsius’ De constantia in the light of the present ongoing pandemic. Through his interest for the Stoics, Lipsius was able to contribute to a more general and European interest towards this topic, reviving the Stoic philosophy under the name of Neostoicism. The influence of his ideas can be seen in some art production, especially the one that (...) is connected to the places where Lipsius lived and it is a testimony to their popularity and the various ways of transmitting them. Even if the Stoic ideal remains an ideal, the Neostoicism of Justus Lipsius is meaningful in as much as any philosophy that deals with crises because it can help us view the text from both its relevancy and our recent general experience. The isolation, the anxiety, the uneasiness and fear are emotions that have been more or less present in our lives during this pandemic and they require a solution. Constancy is the solution that Justus Lipsius proposes. (shrink)

This book makes available again a long out-of-print translation of a major sixteenth-century philosophical text. Lipsius' De Constantia (1584) is an important Humanist text and a key moment in the reception of Stoicism. A dialogue in two books, conceived as a philosophical consolation for those suffering through contemporary religious wars, it proved immensely popular in its day and formed the inspiration for what has become known as 'Neostoicism'. This movement advocated the revival of Stoic ethics in a form that (...) would be palatable to a Christian audience. Lipsius deploys Stoic arguments concerning appropriate attitudes towards emotions and external events. He also makes clear which parts of Stoic philosophy must be rejected, including its materialism and its determinism. De Constantia was translated into a number of vernacular languages soon after its original publication in Latin. Of the English translations which were made, that by Sir John Stradling (1595) became a classic; it was last reprinted in 1939. This new edition offers a lightly revised version of Stradling's translation, along with a new introduction, notes, and bibliography. (shrink)

This article aims to analyse the governmental rationalities that took passions as an object in the French seventeenth century, unleashing the modern transformation in emotional power. The classical question of the intertwining between emotions and rationality is approached through a cultural and historical perspective, analyzing historically situated discourses that define political rationalities that propose to govern, with specific techniques and objectives, certain “emotions”’ that are conceived in a certain way. Passions emerged as an object of government through the statement that (...) passions and not inactive reason were the true drivers of human action. Analyzing the treatises on the government of passions as “arts of government” aimed at the authorities of the period, this article explores initially how Neostoic discourses promoted an exchange between Augustinian government of the will and reason of state’s strategies of manipulation of interests. Subsequently, by scrutinizing the texts of French moralists of the second half of the century, this article shows how, under the influence of Jansenism, they invert Neostoic logic and affirm a new emotional rule for political government: enlightened self-love. The idea that the commerce of selfish passions in the market could promote social peace and material progress cleared the path for the acceptance of a concupiscent order. The article’s contribution resides firstly in the history of the shift in the West’s fundamental emotional rule, love, and secondly in the way in which emotional power could work as a condition of possibility for the emergence of modern economic rationality. (shrink)

Starting from Justus Lipsius's _Monita et exempla politica _, this book offers a collection of essays dealing with the disputed Macchiavellian, Tacitean or Neostoic character of Lipsius's political thought, and its impact on the dynamics of political discourse in Early Modern Europe.

The Voice of Virtue illuminates the musical practices at the heart of the Neostoic movement that spread across French lands during the Wars of Religion in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Guided by twin reparative traditions granting music and philosophy therapeutic power, composers and performers across the embattled Catholic and Protestant confessions turned to moral song as a means of repairing personal and collective virtue damaged by the ongoing conflict. Moral song collections enlarged interest in Stoic philosophy by (...) circulating its ethical program to a broader audience through attractive paraphrases of Stoic maxims set to music. Even more importantly, this skillfully composed repertoire of polyphonic song offered a multi-sensory moral practice that would have resonated powerfully for those well-versed in the paradoxes of the Stoic tradition. Bringing together a repertoire of little-known music prints, a rich visual culture, and an impressive body of literary and philosophical sources, The Voice of Virtue not only illuminates the influence of Stoicism on music, but also reveals that we cannot fully understand Neostoicism as an intellectual or cultural movement without accounting for its vibrant musical sounds. Virtue, as voiced in these Stoic practices, proves to be both rational and fully invested in the sensory processes of the singing body. (shrink)

The main theme of this essay is f i n i t e l i f e, which is the bedrock of modern biopolitics. In the series of lectures devoted to the ‘birth of biopolitics,’ Michel Foucault defines it as a new system of ‘governing the living’ based on the natural cycle of birth and death, and the law of genesis kai phtora, ‘becoming and perishing.’ Foucault’s answer to modern biopolitics is to accept its basic premise – that life is (...) finite, and, consequently, reduced to the natural law of birth and death – and then slightly correct the naive liberal trust in the ‘naturalness’ of human existence by appropriating and internalizing the true essence of the biopolitical paradigm: the disciplining practices. This essay contests Foucault’s minimalist Neostoic program of the ‘care of the self’ by demonstrating that we can still hope for a n o t h e r f i n i t u d e that refrains from any renaturalization of human existence. (shrink)