Classical sources of our understanding of toleration
Here you will find an overview of the articles about Antiquity: about epistemology, dialectics, stoicism, pragmatism, skepticism and forgiveness.
The toleration we know today did not exist in ancient times. The concept only acquired its current meaning since the Reformation. But of course our understanding of toleration did not come out of the blue. In this series I discuss the sources of the concept of toleration in Antiquity. After all, thinkers in the Greek and Roman civilisation also thought about how to deal with deviant ideas, wrong behaviour and foreign peoples, with other cultures and religions.
Discussions about elements of toleration have been going on since ancient times. Arguments for toleration can be found in a whole range of classical philosophical perspectives, including epistemology, dialectics, stoicism, humanism. We will explain those terms later.
Buddhism also developed a view of tolerance, which has something in common with classical stoicism. Because Buddhism had little influence on Western thinking about toleration, we will leave it out of consideration here. A separate series is devoted to the subject of Buddhism and toleration.