Stoic Philosophers on Persons, Property‐Ownership, and Community
Stoic Philosophers on Persons, Property‐Ownership, and Community
This chapter suggests a further tie between Stoicism and later conceptions of the person as a moral, psychological, and legal entity. That tie has to do not only with consciousness or self-consciousness, but also with the concept of property or ownership, a concept that the Stoics connected with self-consciousness and individual identity in a highly original way. It is argued that the Stoics pioneered two key notions of liberal thought: first, that every human individual is the natural and rightful owner of at least one thing — himself or herself; second, that human nature inclines individual human beings to acquire private property and to interact with one another as property-owners. Stoic ideas about human beings as property-owners have striking affinities with 17th-century and Enlightenment thought on property and persons, especially ideas developed by Locke and Hegel.
Keywords: Stoicism, liberal thought, private property, human nature, self-consciousness, individual identity
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