Stilpo

Stilpo of Megara was a Greek philosopher of the Megarian school, active roughly from the late fourth century to the early third century BC. He matters because he linked Socratic dialectic, Cynic ethics and the early roots of Stoicism, and because he directly shaped the thinking of Zeno of Citium.

According to tradition, he was a native of Megara and studied with Thrasymachus of Corinth or with Pasicles, brother of Crates of Thebes, though the sources disagree. He probably lived after Euclid of Megara, which makes it unlikely that he was Euclid's direct pupil. He earned a reputation as a formidable debater: one account has him arguing with Diodorus Cronus at the court of Ptolemy Soter, while another says he declined the king's invitation to Alexandria. Demetrius, son of Antigonus, spared his house when he captured Megara and offered compensation, which Stilpo refused.

None of his writings survive, and we know only a few dialogue titles and fragments quoted by others. His best-known logical claim is that the universal is not contained in the individual and concrete: to speak of a particular person is to speak of no one in particular, because no predicate exhausts them. Plutarch also records his distinction between being a horse and running, which shows that predicates cannot simply be swapped.

In ethics he stressed the self-sufficiency of the wise person, who should overcome evil and not be disturbed by it. A fragment preserved by Teles argues that exile cannot deprive anyone of goods of the soul, of the body or external goods, since the first are the ones that matter most. This calm detachment anticipated the Stoic ideal of apatheia.

His influence was considerable. He attracted followers such as Menedemus and Asclepiades, leaders of the Eretrian school, and Zeno, who took from him the emphasis on reason and virtue. Although he was not a Stoic, his views on self-sufficiency and mastery of the passions became part of the inheritance that Stoicism absorbed and transformed.