Repulsione spontanea e indotta. Aspetti della teoria stoica dell'educazione

The notion of repulsion plays a significant role in Stoic physiology and psychology, where it is analyzed as a dynamic of close interaction between imagination (phantasia) and corporeality, as well as in ethics and paedagogy. What characterizes the Stoic reflection on this particular theme is its systematic character and the structural position that repulsion assumes in the anthropological context. The repulsion plays firstly a decisive role in the cognitive development of the child, whose early experiences are not neutral but marked by both attractive and repulsive feelings. Accordingly, repulsion is a normative experience so that the content of the "repulsive" representation must be translated into linguistic terms and to give rise to a rule, precisely a prohibition.