Investigating the world

According to TED, Stoicism was created by Zeno of Cyprus (sic) a long time ago in Greek and the doctrine was based on virtue, tolerance and self-control (Citium). Today, Stoicism is colloquially associated with a person that is able to become calm under pressure or to avoid emotional extremes. Originally, more than just an attitude, Stoicism provided a conception of the Universe called Logos, where everything operated as a web of cause and effects. In other words, the Logos was a rational structure of the Universe. If the world operates this way, so we don’t have control over the events but we need to know how to approach them. Instead of thinking in an ideal world, we need to face the world as it is supported by the cardinal virtues: wisdom, temperance, justice and courage that are responsible for our self-improvement. According to Seneca, “Sometimes, even to live is an act of courage”. However, the personal improvement is not self-centred, but is a way to change the others.

Regardless of the fact that they can be considered dogmatic philosophies and have things in common, like materiality of the soul, the objective here is to check the differences between Stoicism and Epicureanism, the last one considered a non-Socratic school. The main goal in this task is to understand the nature of “the good”: while for Stoicism virtue is the good, for Epicureanism pleasure is the good (and the pain is bad). It is important say that the comparison is done by the stoic point of view, the Epictetus' Criticisms of Epicureanism. Epictetus complains that Epicureans didn’t understand the pleasure of the soul, in other words, they didn’t understand that the mental pleasure is better than the physical one (on the edge, the pleasure of the mind comes from the pleasure of the body…). Even though, for the Epicureanism, reading a book is better than drugs and sex, they consider that the pleasure is the absence of pain. Epictetus believes that Epicurus didn’t understand th