Breaking Into Philosophy

“Philosophy is like a locked castle with no doors and windows…”

It’s been said that philosophy is like a locked castle with no doors or windows, yet all the “doing” of philosophy happens inside this castle.

How does one enter this proverbial castle of philosophy? How should one get started? This is the biggest and often most disorienting question for the beginning philosopher.

Different philosophers have taken different approaches to this problem. In most cases, it seems to determine what “kind” of philosophy you are most concerned with.

In this article, I am going to explore how the Stoics broke into philosophy, and how it informed their method.

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The Stoic Approach

The Stoics, even the earliest Stoics, have always taken an ethical approach to life. They wanted to know how is it that one lives a good life, so their chief questions from the Ancient Greek Stoics to the Late Roman Stoics were always questions that helped us deal with life.

But there is a difference as to how the Ancient Greek and Roman Stoics broke into philosophy. The Ancient Greeks seemed to focus on the metaphysical and mythological questions rather than the ethical questions.