The terms you meet in Stoic texts, explained in plain language: from the dichotomy of control and prohairesis to amor fati and memento mori. Sixteen concepts, with the Greek or Latin original.
ta eph'hemin / ta ouk eph'hemin
The division of everything into what is up to us and what is not. Our judgments, choices, attention and character are; outcomes, other people, the past, the body and reputation are not. It opens the Enchiridion of Epictetus and is the foundation of this whole site.
προαίρεσις
The faculty of choice: the part of you that judges impressions and decides what to do with them. Epictetus called it the only thing that is truly yours, and the only thing no tyrant can reach. Usually translated as will, moral purpose or the power of choice.
φαντασία
An impression: how something appears to you before you have judged it. He insulted me is not an impression but a judgment; a sound, a face, a message is the impression. The practice starts with keeping the two apart.
συγκατάθεσις
Assent: the moment you agree with an impression and it becomes your judgment. Impressions arrive uninvited, assent is yours. Almost the entire Stoic practice takes place in this narrow gap.
propatheiai
The involuntary bodily reactions that come before any judgment: the flush, the startle, the sting, the tears. Seneca insisted these are not faults and not within our power. The practice begins at the second movement, the assent.
adiaphora
Everything that is neither good nor bad in itself: health, money, reputation, death. Not unimportant, but not what makes a life good. The Stoics were emphatic that virtue alone is good.
proegmena
Among the indifferents, the ones a sensible person naturally prefers: health over illness, wealth over poverty, being liked over being hated. You may pursue them, as long as you do not confuse them with the good.
ἀπάθεια
Freedom from destructive passions. Not apathy and not numbness: the Stoic still feels, but is no longer ruled by fear, craving or rage. The English word apathy descends from it and means almost the opposite.
ἀταραξία
Untroubledness: the calm that follows from sorting correctly. It is not the goal you chase directly, but what appears when you stop demanding things that were never yours.
Latin, love of fate
Not merely accepting what happens but wanting it. Marcus Aurelius' version: love what is woven for you. It goes a step beyond acceptance, and it is the hardest instruction in the whole tradition.
Latin, the premeditation of evils
Calmly imagining in advance what could be lost or go wrong. Not to suffer beforehand, but to take away fate's element of surprise. Seneca's letter about the fire of Lyon is the classic example.
Latin, remember you will die
Keeping mortality in view, not to become gloomy but to make today urgent. The Stoics used it as a corrective to postponement and to trivial worries.
οἰκείωσις
The widening of concern outward: from yourself, to your family, to your city, to humanity. Hierocles pictured it as concentric circles that you gradually draw inward. It is the root of the Stoic idea of the world citizen.
προκόπτων
One who is making progress. The Stoics did not claim to be sages; they called themselves people on the way. It is the highest rank on this site, deliberately, because there is no rank called finished.
λόγος
Reason: both the rational order of the universe and the reasoning faculty in each person. The Stoics held that living well means living in agreement with it, which is where the phrase living according to nature comes from.
στοὰ ποικίλη
The painted colonnade on the agora of Athens where Zeno taught. His students were first called Zenonians, then simply named after the place. The philosophy therefore takes its name from a piece of architecture.
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions