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Where did the notion of 'moral duty' come from? In The Invention of Duty: Stoicism as Deontology, Jack Visnjic argues that it was the Stoics who first developed a robust notion of duty as well as a deontological ethics.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

This article moves between Aristotle, Maimonides, and the Stoics. Aristotle’s moral taxonomy, outlined in NE 7.1, appears problematic, given his view that, in the sphere of moral virtue, the intermediate (temperance, courage) is the extreme, and there is no excess of temperance or courage. This is hard to square with the moral agent whom he describes as possessed of “hyperbolic” (hyperbole, excessive) virtue. As Aristotle has very little to say about the latter, I turn to Maimonides and the Stoics for clarification and enlightenment.

The Roman imperial Stoics were familiar with exile. I argue that the Stoics’ view of being a refugee differed sharply from their view of what is owed to refugees. A Stoic adopts the perspective of a cosmopolitēs, a ‘citizen of the world’, a rational being everywhere at home in the universe. Virtue can be cultivated and practiced in any locale, so being a refugee is an ‘indifferent’ that poses no obstacle to happiness. But other people are our fellow cosmic citizens regardless of their language, race, ethnicity, customs, or country of origin. Our natural affinity and shared sociability with all people require us to help refugees and embrace them as welcome neighbors. Failure to do so violates our common reason, justice, and the gods’ cosmic law.

In ancient Stoicism, tension ( tonos ) was a principle of psychosomatic unity, individual and collective cohesion, and a virtuous disposition. Orthodox theologians deployed the notion of weak tension to discredit theaters and stadia as spaces of transmission of listlessness and vice. At the same time, they applied the concept of tension to sanctify places of torture and imprisonment, as well as the religious edifices commemorating martyrdom. This article will assess both the emancipatory and repressive aspects of the theological discourse on tension in their philosophical and medical contexts. Works of Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, and Severus of Antioch will be examined in the light of hagiographic, epigraphic, and papyrological evidence.

In the context of Stoic philosophical ethics, this article examines the theory of leadership traits and behaviour, leadership virtues, communication, and life practices. The Stoic philosophical tradition, which originated in ancient antiquity, is gaining popularity and relevance in today’s world of technological change, competition and insecurity. An analysis of the scientific literature reveals that leadership is widely addressed within various disciplines, reflecting its growing role in economics, business, politics, education, the media, and other areas of society. The article demonstrates that although the Stoics did not use the terms ‘leadership’ or ‘communication,’ their philosophy can be related to the theory of personal leadership by providing a broad and comprehensive presentation of the individual’s moral system, practices of self-restraint and self-development in life, behavioural patterns and communication principles. The analysis reveals that the theories of self-regulation, self-direction, intrinsic motivation and other qualities of a leader, as defined by contemporary leadership researchers, have their origins in Stoic philosophy.

The aim of this article is to situate Chaucer’s The House of Fame in the tradition of exercising the self as practiced by ancient philosophers and theorized by Pierre Hadot. It shows that Chaucer’s poem contains echoes of an ancient exercise referred to as ‘the view from above’, which engages the faculties of the imagination in order to enable an individual to review their life and to situate it in the context of universal nature. The poet’s creative use of the ancient motif of the celestial flight, I will argue, distances him from those writers who use the theme to develop the contemptus mundi topos and affiliates him with those ancient thinkers who, like Marcus Aurelius, employ it to turn their attention to their own self, which may be achieved via meditations on the identity and homogeneity of all things (homoeides). It is Chaucer’s use of the view from above topos that vindicates the role of imagination by showing how it contributes to self-knowledge, that is, to an awareness of where one stands.