Aquinas & the Stoics: An Ethical Philosophy Selector

I tried out the Ethical Philosophy Selector, and this is how it rated my answers:

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. Stoics (99%)
3. Spinoza (89%)
4. Cynics (78%)
5. Aristotle (77%)
6. Ayn Rand (70%)
7. Jeremy Bentham (63%)
8. John Stuart Mill (59%)
9. Nietzsche (58%)
10. St. Augustine (54%)
11. Kant (52%)
12. David Hume (51%)
13. Jean-Paul Sartre (46%)
14. Plato (44%)
15. Thomas Hobbes (41%)
16. Epicureans (40%)
17. Prescriptivism (33%)
18. Ockham (26%)
19. Nel Noddings (19%)

So I scored highly with both St. Thomas Aquinas and the Stoics. The website had this to say about Stoicism:

• The common capacity to reason allows all humans to achieve virtue and wisdom.
• The external circumstances of a person’s life are irrelevant.
• One can achieve virtue by becoming indifferent to external differences.
• Passions must be rejected all together in deciding what is good and what is bad.
• Reason alone must be used in deciding what is good and what is bad.
• The common ability of humans to reason is why ethical relativism should be rejected.

Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Stoicism. I still remember Loyal Rue’s lectures on Stoicism my freshman year of college during a history of philosophy course (I was a philosophy major in college). Though their movement dates to the Ancient Greeks, it is still intriguing, and one I think that has value in this age of passions.

They have a variety of other philosophical “selectors” here, such as if your taste is more political philosophy than ethics.

[link via Caterina who rated 100% Nietzsche, which I think means that she’ll be wandering the streets stark raving mad in her old age]