The Stoic Provenance of the Notion of Prosochê

Abstract

Abstract Late Stoics and, in particular, Epictetus made ample use of the notion of attention (prosochê), which they understood as the soul’s vigilant focus on sense impressions and on the Stoic principles. Attention, in their view, was meant to assist our self-examination and lead to ethical progress. It was thus regarded as a Stoic good and a constitutive part of eudaimonia. Early Stoics did not seem to have invoked such a notion, whereas the Neoplatonists appropriated it into their psychology by postulating the soul’s attentive part, which they introduced to explain both perceptual and intellectual attention as well as self-awareness.