It is widely agreed that there is a gap between the personal and the social ethics of the Stoics due to the difficulty of harmonizing personal and social oikeiōsis . By reconstructing Epictetus' theory of oikeiōsis , this paper aims to show that, in his ethics, there is no such gap, and this for two reasons: first, his account of social oikeiōsis is not meant to ground his social ethics; second, his theory of personal oikeiōsis is a philosophical construct designed to provide a naturalistic justification to the utopian social project of the cosmopolis rather than to ground his personal ethics.

Epictetus | Stoicism | Plato | ethics | oikeiōsis | cosmopolis